Hi Blinders!!
Happy to share my interview experience over the last 3 months.
Current Job: Microsoft L62, YOE: 7, TC: ~220K
Job Offers:
FB E5: 200K base/637K equity/4 years/ 95K sign-on/15% bonus == TC ~ 480K for first year (Signing FB offer letter soon)
Google L4: 170K/590K(38%,28,20,14),/0/15% == TC~ 420K first year
Lyft L5: 200K/200K/45K == TC ~445K first year
Amazon L5: TC ~308K (recruiter said that is the max if you really want to join, didn’t push further)
Zillow P3: TC ~255K
Outreach, Senior: Didn’t continue with team matching after other offers.
Rejects:
Coinbase: Onsite stage
Doordash/Dropbox : Phone screen.
Prep strategy:
Motivation: It was very important for me to be 100% sure that I wanted to leave the current job, otherwise I would have taken it too easy and wouldn’t have spent so much time on prep. So, my advice to anyone starting the prep is to have a good motive to fall back to whenever you feel like giving up. For me the main motivating factor was boring work and shitty TC.
Schedule: I started in early December so the workload was very minimal and used up the break for studying. Specially, with COVID there was nothing much to do anyway. I spent the first month practicing LC mediums and by mid-jan I was able to do 2 mediums in 45 minutes. Just in time for my phone screens. Then I started with System Design and LC hards and prepped for around a month before my onsites.
Leetcode: This is something you can’t escape. I was interviewing for Senior level everywhere, so the expectation was 2 mediums or 1 medium/1 hard in 45 minutes. So, I spent a lot of time practicing with LC’s mock tests to make sure I’m solving problems in time. People have been asking how many questions have I done, but I don’t think the number really matters. You should make sure you cover enough problems of each topic rather than going deep in 1 topic and skipping others. TIP: Do the different topics under “Explore” on LC, those should be enough to get you through any Phone screen and most Onsites as well.
NO ONE ASKED DP QUESTIONS, DON'T WASTE TIME ON DP.
System Design: This was the most important part for me as I was interviewing for a Senior role. I started with the usual “Educative.io” courses which are good for warming up but the interviewers are looking for more in-depth analysis. So I went through https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer, https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Data-Intensive-Applications-Reliable-Maintainable/dp/1449373321, and System Design Interview – An insider's guide, Second Edition.
Interview Experience:
Signed NDAs everywhere so won’t share exact question but will share topics covered in each interview.
Coinbase:
Phone Screen: Implement file system APIs and I finished it early so the interviewer asked a few follow up questions to scale out as a service.
Onsite:
2 coding questions: The expectations to have a running code in 1.5 hours with follow ups. Topics were related to Backtracking, Graph traversal, Max Flow LC hard with follow ups. I was able to solve the first part of both problems but took time to solve follow ups. Feedback was that I was slow to complete the hard questions, they are expecting a higher bar for a Senior.
1 System Design: Standard system design problem you can find on Educative.io. Main emphasis on SQL vs NoSQL, data layer, app layer and scaling logic.
Amazon:
3 Coding, 1 System Design.
Coding rounds: These were standard leetcode type of questions. Major factor was the leadership principles. The interviewees spent ~60% of the interview on getting the data points on the LPs, at one point it felt like a behavioral interview. So make sure you have prepared all LPs and answers. Topics: Array, Stack, String, Map.
System Design: Again a standard educative.io question and discussion on NoSql vs SQL. This one also had ~60% LP questions.
Google:
3 Coding, 1 System Design, 1 Behavioral
Coding Rounds: All rounds were just coding and no other questions. 2 interviewers started with a medium level question. Then had follow ups which kept getting harder. I was able to complete all follow ups with working code in 1 of the interviews and was able to solve the problems with harded follow ups with some hints in the other 2. Topics covered: Array, Sorting, Graphs.
System design: This round was different from other companies as I was asked to build a specific component of the system rather than a whole app. This was the hardest System Design as the interviewer went into details of each workflow. Concepts from the DDIA book really helped in this round.
Facebook:
Phone Screen: LC hard and then follow up.
Onsite:
2 Coding, 2 System Design, 1 Behavioral
Coding Rounds: Both rounds had multiple questions LC Medium/Hard. FB was my best interview of all so I was able to complete 2-3 problems in both rounds. The questions were not from LC tagged but they were similar. TIP: Speed and Confidence. Topics: Stack, DFS/BFS, Arrays
System design: Both questions were from Educative.io but the interviewers went into details of each component so reading up on concepts helped a lot.
Zillow:
3 Coding, 1 System Design
Coding rounds: Nothing special here, LC tagged for Zillow.
System Design: Non-standard question, the interviewer asked to update an existing Zillow feature. My work-ex and other system design concepts were helpful.
Lyft:
1 Laptop Coding, 2 System Design
Laptop Coding: LC hard question, the expectation is to write a working coding with no bugs and read from std input.
System Designs: Similar to educative.io but more in-depth questions for each Design.
#hiring #interviewquestions #faang
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I read first 7 chapters that were enough for me.