I wasn’t aware of Blind when I joined Amazon. But once I joined the community, I realized how badly I got screwed over with my Amazon offer. In these past years, I’ve benefited a lot from the information which has been shared in this community and wanted to contribute back. I recently received offers from 4 companies, none of which are FAANG. However, I am happy with the companies and the offers I’ve received. All these numbers are the final after negotiation and are for working out of Seattle. Microsoft Base: $170K Equity: $390K over 4 years Joining Bonus: $30K over 2 years TC 1st/2nd year: $282.5K, 3rd year onwards: 267.5K Level: L63 Atlassian Base: $205K Equity: $500K over 4 years Joining Bonus: $20K TC 1st year: $350K, 2nd year onwards: $330K Level: P5 Square Base: 195K Equity: 680K over 4 years Joining bonus: $20K TC 1st year: $385K, 2nd year onwards: $365K Level: L5 Instacart Base: 200K Equity: 824K over 4 years Joining bonus: 30K TC 1st year: $436K, 2nd year onwards: $406K Level: L5 I ended up taking the offer from Square as I absolutely loved the team and I had heard good things about the company from my friends working there and also on Blind. Atlassian was a close second, but their products don’t really excite me, so I didn’t end up choosing them. Instacart was my third choice given that they have a potential to be huge if they play their cards right, but the recent fiascos kinda put me off. Microsoft’s salary was extremely lacking, so they were never really in the running. The whole process took about 6 months. I spent my initial month brushing up CS concepts from textbooks like CLRS. The next 2 months, I started doing LeetCode questions starting with easy and then quickly moving to medium questions. I rarely solved hard questions and only solved them when they were tagged to a company I was interviewing with (side-note, LeetCode Premium is worth its weight in gold. The access to company tags, discussions and solutions is completely worth it). The last 3 months I spent preparing for system design and doing LC questions from time to time. For system design, I went through about half of DDIA as I didn’t have time for more. Most of my preparation after was coming up with possible designs for different questions and improving them by looking at various different solutions online for the same question. I divided the companies I applied to into 3 categories, the first which I would never join, the second which I might and the third which I will join for sure if I receive a good offer. I scheduled interviews with companies in the first category early on to see how well I am prepared. This definitely helped me course-correct as I bombed most of those interviews. Then I scheduled phone interviews for the second and third category together so that I don’t end up with all high stress interviews towards the end. Me concentrating only on LC in the first 2 months paid dividends here as most phone interviews are LC-like. For the onsite interviews, I first interviewed with companies in the second category and then the third. I did this to help me get some real-world practice with system design rounds and rectify my mistakes in the future interviews. While it was stressful towards the end, I believe it was the right move. All my onsite interviews were back to back. I had informed the recruiters of all the companies I was interviewing with about this. So when I received offers, I was able to have them wait till I heard back from all the companies. Interestingly, none of the recruiters pushed back and all of them were very supportive of my timelines. Lastly, I couldn’t have done any of this without the support of my SO, who took over ALL my responsibilities and gave me all the time she could for preparation. Without her and her encouragement, I wouldn’t have been able to make it. Anyway, this post ended up being a lot longer than I wanted it to be. I’ll end the post with Blind tax and a good night. Thanks for reading! ----- Update ----- Hi folks. I apologize for not being very responsive today. I didn’t really expect the post to get as many eyes on it as it did. Nonetheless I am happy that people found some of its contents to be helpful. I was initially trying (and planning) to respond to everyone individually but that just isn’t scaling. So I am going to try and answer everyone’s questions as part of this update. I’ll omit some details here and there to maintain my anonymity, but I’ll try to make sure that does not affect the answer. Also, please feel free to skip any question which you don’t find relevant. Have I always been a SWE? What was my previous background? > I’ve not always been a SWE. I was a DE before at two no-name companies but they both did involve very heavy programming with a side of SQL, so I am not new to programming in general. How long have I been at Amazon and how has my experience been? > I joined Amazon as a SDE2 and have been there for a few years now, more than most. My first year was incredibly hard given my background. However, I did learn a lot in that first year which made the subsequent years easier. Contrary to popular opinion, not all teams at Amazon are bad. It very heavily depends on who ends up being your manager and how the organization’s leadership is. In my experience, the culture at Amazon is definitely worse than the other places I’ve worked at but not as bad as the extreme examples that are portrayed here on Blind and elsewhere. Moving up can be an uphill battle though. I quickly learned that in order to advance at Amazon I’d have to work extreme hours and step on other people’s toes. I didn’t want to do that, so I didn’t actively try to get a promotion. I didn’t really receive a lot of pushback from my managers for it, but my TC remained pretty much stagnant. I think it’s a good place for younger folks to join as you’d learn a lot about how large companies function and how to design scalable services and what are the standard practices to follow if you’re a SWE (and especially if you’re in AWS). But as usual, YMMV. What’s my current role at Amazon and what positions were the offers for? > I am currently an SDE2 at Amazon. All my offers were also SWE. How did I find time to prepare while working a full time job? > After a failed attempt to move out of Amazon after my first year and after procrastinating for a while, I had decided that I was going to make it out this time around. So I decided to work reduced hours and use it for preparation instead. I realized early on that it would affect my annual appraisal, but I made peace with it and moved on. While preparing, how did I distribute my time? > When I started, I spent my mornings before work and my evenings and nights after work studying. I was very aggressive for the first 4 months up until I was done with my phone screens, making sure I didn’t waste a minute. Between work and prep, I felt I was burning out, so I slowed down for the last 3 months to make sure I was not exhausted by the time I had to give my onsite interviews (I know that adds up to 7 months, which was the actual time). If I had to redo this, I’d spend a few hours less in the beginning as well. I realized consistency is more important than hours spent. There were obviously days when I couldn’t spend as much time. On those days I made sure I solved at least one question, even if it was an LC-easy just to make sure I don’t break the rhythm. How many LC questions did I solve and what was their distribution? > I did about 50 easy, 125 medium and 25 hard. These do not include questions I solved from other sources like CLRS (Introduction to Algorithms), CTCI (Cracking the Coding Interview), EPI (Elements of Programming Interviews) and Meta provided practice coding questions (which are in their interview portal). I also solved most of the Blind 75 questions. What I tried to optimize for were question patterns (like sliding window, two-pointers etc). LeetCode premium came in handy here since they tag questions with such patterns and because you can find optimal solutions in their discussion forum. CLRS is a huge book. Why would I even attempt to read it instead of just going through CTCI/ EPI or just doing LeetCode? > After my previous failed attempt, I wanted to make sure I had strong fundamentals. CLRS definitely helped me there. I obviously did not go through all of the book and skipped parts (including whole chapters) which I didn’t find relevant, but I went through a good chunk of the book which helped me understand how different data structures are implemented. I used this knowledge to justify my choice for data structures during interviews and while explaining the time and space complexities. Believe it or not, one of the most commonly asked side-questions for me was about HashMap internals. That said, I wouldn’t say CLRS is essential. As long as you can learn/brush-up the topics you find in CLRS from elsewhere, you should be good. How was the question distribution across different companies? Are questions mostly LC-like? Is it worth doing the company-tagged question on LC? > The question distribution varied from company to company. For eg. Square and Atlassian were all mediums whereas DoorDash and Meta were mostly hard. Companies like Instacart, Coinbase and Square were less LC-like but still had some elements of it; like they would start from a place which wouldn’t seem LC-like then end at a place where knowing the LC patterns would definitely help. As far as the company-tagged questions are concerned, I saw that a lot of questions were similar to the ones that were tagged on LC. So going through them right before the interview can only help. If you don’t have time to solve them, just read through the solutions. What is the ratio of LC and design questions in the interview? > This really depends on the level you’re interviewing for. For all senior levels, expect at least one system design. If you’re being interviewed for a Staff-like level, expect two. What kind of system design questions did I get? > I can’t share the actual questions, but what I can tell you is that more often than not the questions were very close to what the company was doing (for smaller companies) or the organization the interviewer worked at (for larger companies). Resources/tips for system design? > I started with DDIA (Designing Data Intensive Application). It’s an incredible book with very dense content; if you want you could spend months exploring it. It’s very informative, so if you have time I’d suggest going through it. Due to time constraints, I couldn’t go through more than half of it, but whatever I read helped me with my interviews. Another resource I found to be very useful was this channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/SystemDesignInterview. I went through all its videos multiple times since those videos also pack a lot of information. I also found Grokking the System Design Interview Educative course helpful, but only for understanding how to do back of the napkin math. My experience has told me that doing resource/infrastructure estimation during the interview scores extra brownie points with the interviewer, but of course YMMV. What companies did I apply to? Did I apply to any FAANGs? Did I interview with Google/Meta and what was the outcome? > I applied to 3 of the 5 FAANGs and did not receive offers from any. I also got rejected by many other companies. In some cases I knew that I had bombed the interview and in other cases, I felt like my interviews went well at the time, but careful examination later told me otherwise. Usually it’s hard to gauge how an interview went until after you know the outcome; so my advice would be not to try to worry about that and treat every company you interview with as the only company you’re interviewing with. What is the grant price of Square (and other offers)? > From what I understand, this is going to depend on when I join the company. Any tips on negotiating? > I just had competing offers lined up a few days from each other. I didn’t share any initial numbers with my recruiters. As soon as I received my first numbers I shared them with others and kept everyone informed. I was candid with them when I knew the numbers they shared or the level they offered were not acceptable to me. I also shared what I genuinely liked about their company and what I liked about others, because for me it wasn’t just about the money. Not sure if this helps, but this is what I did. Why didn’t you count the annual bonus while evaluating offers? > From my offers only Atlassian offers an annual bonus. I did consider that while evaluating my offer, but while sharing on Blind I stuck to the standard format which everyone here expects. > How did you plan interviews during the work hours? I didn’t. Given that I was working reduced hours, I wanted to make sure that I properly utilized those hours and completed my work as soon as I could. For phone screens I usually did one early morning interview per day before my work day began. For onsites, I took the day off. Did I apply directly or through referrals? > Both. Although in my experience the turnaround time on referrals was much shorter. Are any of the offers remote? > All except for Microsoft were remote. How did I classify the companies I applied to into different categories? > I’d say this is very subjective and therefore it’s not appropriate for me to share what companies I had in which bucket. What I can tell you is that I was optimizing for a healthy mix of work-life balance, culture, compensation and personal growth. You cannot have it all, so I made concessions based on the situation. Due to this my first category consisted of enterprise dinosaurs and companies with bad cultural reputation, the second category of companies with high compensation, questionable work-life balance but great learning opportunities and the third category with great work-life balance and culture, good learning opportunities and reasonable compensation. Anyway, I hope this answers most if not all of the questions which folks posted in the comments. I most likely wouldn’t be updating this post any longer but I hope it has been helpful. Thank you for all the kind works and good luck on your search! TC: 200K (and falling) YoE: 7
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Congrats on the offers, hard work and method pay!
And a whole lot of luck too, but thank you :)
Congrats OP, I'm happy for you!
Thank you!
Wow .. Congrats OP. I was thinking some day I’ll turn around my life and write something like this on Blind, 3 months on this platform, yet to start. I started but failed interviews. Taking a break from everything. I am severely cliffed out and stuck, lacking motivation right now even though my tc is 🥜
Taking a break is important. But don't take too long a break. Just start little by little and be consistent. If I can do it, I am sure you can too. Good luck!
Thank you!
Congrats! I am taking notes on how you lined up offers at same time like that.
Just set expectations with recruiters from the start and keep them informed of any changes/delays etc.
What are the recent fiascos with Instacart?
+1 please expand
They reduced their valuation from 40b to 26b. Then they backfilled folks who joined at 40b in 2022 but did not backfill folks who joined at 40b in 2021 causing a divide between the older and the newer employees. Everyone I talked to said Instacart is overvalued even at 26b. So the same thing can happen to me in the near future if I joined them now.
Quality post
Thank you. I tried to include all the important information without rambling on and on.