obligatory tc - $90 per hour, consultant. obligatory yoe - 16+ in java, includes 9+ in android (i admit, sorta pigeon-holed), that is 13+ in the us as an immigrant on a h1-b work-visa. TLDR; while interviewing for potentially android (staff / senior staff, or even down-leveled to senior roles), is it expected that i should know the entirety of system design - grokking the system design, designing data-intensive apps, like, all of full-stack real-experience knowledge including all solutions for site-traffic and scalability, more like a textbook syllabus scripted answers prep? or, is it sufficient / adequate that i should know / practice enough based of a larger portion of my day-to-day, interacting / hand-shaking with micro-services end-points dedicated for mobile data-exchange kind of stuff, and showcase some ability to contribute / collaborate about deeper back-end stuff? aspiration - potentially senior staff or staff, open to senior engineer roles at FAANGs, of course. problem - can't clear interviews at peloton, rakuten, wayfair, tripadvisor etc, particularly system-design appears to be like asking a small fish from a big-pond to compete by climbing a terrestrial tree. most system design interview questions are practically one-liners, mostly at non-FAANGs. typically these interview-rounds are performed by full-stack engineers, and i'd believe the expectation is for full-stack skills as well, despite i'd have applied and interviewing for android specific roles (aligned with my skill-set and experience?, much??) design twitter. design chat feature in an e-commerce app. scale a nflx or amazon prime video from 20K to 50K https-requests in less than half-second duration. a lot of system-design clearly is an entire organization's problem, be it twitter or scaling the video playback at nflx, however, if one person is expected to solve / provide a fully functioning solution in less than an hour, without babbling on any essential keywords, jargons, shouldn't that be more aligned to the role the person is interviewing for? i've also been asked to describe pros and cons between server-side products, tech-stacks and suites that i do not have any experience or knowledge about, never touched a single-time in the past - kafka vs rabbit-mq? no-sql vs graph-sql, rather types of graph-sql and how they can be put to use? particularly, site-traffic and scalability related load-parameters, read-write ratios, latencies, request-response times and reorganizing backend components accordingly. all i could do was politely admit that i do not have any real-experience or even text-book knowledge of server-side stacks that i had never worked with in the recent past. this is all for android / front-end roles. should i just regard my career with android apps development is a dead-end, and go with textbook syllabus scripted answers from grokking and data-intensive for system-design questions tailored for full-stack roles, and just pray for a miracle, or just prepare and focus on what i know best with regards to android - particularly for roles at FAANGs?
Why do you think android role is dead end? I am not mobile eng but mobile eng is not dead end and in fact we have shortage to find good mobile eng, still true even at big companies. You can be a mobile eng but have good high level understanding of other stacks without specializing in it. If you got asked super tough specific questions even after you disclose you are applying for android role then that is the problem with that company. It will not be a good match. Good interviewer will consider your background for the expectation. If they dont, sound like a bad company and you dont want to work there anyway. Full stack role is a scam/stupid. I laugh everytime someone mention they are full stack since most of the time, these people are not good enough to call them full stack. Programming is programming and some platform have specific domain knowledge. Android engineer can spend some time and work on backend and vice versa. Now, would they be as good as the specialist? Unlikely. But so does the people who claim they are full stack here. I swear it is mostly ego thing and in reality they barely know the stack.
thank you for taking time to read, and provide a detailed answer. would you still recommend, when i apply for android specific roles as a potential staff and senior-staff, i should be knowledgable (expert-level??) about site-traffic and scalablity, request-response ratios, read-write ratios and such, that are all backend and server-side keywords / concepts? rather, in simpler words, are front-end / client-side engineers expected to know as much about server-side solutions to common text-book syllabus problems discussed in 'grokking' and designing data-intensive apps book?
Usually even though they have this module, good companies will adjust expectation on the depth of the answer you provide, iust like swe vs staff level of depth. Expectation is higher if that is your niche. You can master all those topic but the challenge is would you still have enough resource to be excellent at your own domain? The expectation for something in your domain would be higher so you dont want to lose point on that. Plus you have to remember, usually to get offer you dont need to do excellent on all modules. You cant do really really bad in one module (for the most part) so you should just target for 'ok'. Most people got offer from doing good on all modules, or excellent on some modules but ok in some. These are all discussed by people, not robot so they will take note if you are really good in your domain and might be willing to overlook other weaknesses for the potential you show.
I wonder the same thing tbh
No takers? There's a TLDR up there??
Hey what did peloton end up asking you?