Finally got an offer and will be joining Google next month as an L3. During my interview journey I was checking Blind excessively and learned a lot, so I decided to give back a little. Hopefully this post will help some fellow Blinders. The rest of the post will be sorta chronological.
Interview Prep
Coding - Leetcode 93 problems solved, 37 easy, 50 medium, 6 hard, and probably 10 ish I gave up half way through. I got lc premium so I could do company tagged questions and sorted them by frequency. I was pretty lazy and only did prep whenever I had an interview scheduled.
System Design - Barely studied. Mostly looked at https://www.educative.io/courses/grokking-the-system-design-interview, and followed this Blind post: https://www.teamblind.com/post/My-Approach-to-System-Design-V4SJARdx
Behavioral - I made a document to collect behavioral questions I found on Leetcode discussion or prep emails from recruiters. I go through the list and formulate my answers to them once in a while or whenever I could think up a good answer or example.
How I Got Interviews
Passively wait for recruiters to reach out on LinkedIn. Every time I got a rejection I went and start applying to other companies, but none of them responded. I've only gotten interviews from LinkedIn recruiters. Make sure you turn on 'I'm open to job opportunities' on LinkedIn if you want recruiters to reach out.
Now time for all the interviews I went through.
LinkedIn - Went through to onsite. Phone screen question was on LC company tagged, so I did extremely well. Onsite was 2 coding, 1 lunch convo, 1 HM behavioral, 1 project discussion, and 1 system design. I completely failed the system design round and that was the reason why I got rejected. Overall I enjoyed the whole interview process. The recruiters were very professional and even let me ask a lot of questions regarding the decision. Totally bummed I didn't get an offer.
Dropbox - Did a phone interview and got ghosted afterwards. I hate companies who ghosts so I wiped the interview off my brain. Sorry fam, no useful info here except they ghost.
Facebook - Got a phone interview and only managed to complete 1 question(barely). It had a lot of edge cases and the interviewer had to point them out to me. Obvious rejection. FB has been consistently the hardest interviews I've eve had.
DoorDash - Went through to onsite. All the coding questions I've gotten were LC company tagged, but I still managed to mess up a question I've completed on LC. System design round was extremely simple. I followed the Blind post and the interview went pretty well. The manager round was interesting. Dude asked me a bunch of DD related problem solving and customer experience design questions. Got rejected for being bad at coding.
VMware - Got a phone interview. Interviewer didn't even know he was the 1st interview I had with VMware. He was struggling to come up with questions and just asked me a bunch of trivia and behavioral questions. Got ghosted for 2 months and then received a rejection email. Would not recommend this company.
Robinhood - Got a Karat interview. Read on Blind that Karat interviews are horrible, but levels.fyi said RH salaries are super high I decided to try anyway. Yup, Karat interviews are stupid. It was a third party interview that has nothing to do with RH. It included 3 'system design' questions and a coding question that had to pass their premade test cases. I thought I did pretty well, but got a rejection email a week later.
Affirm - Got a phone interview. Just a behavioral, but got rejected anyway.
Uber - Recruiter was a mess, always MIA after each step and then randomly texted me or called me out of the blue. The first step was a codesignal assessment. It had 4 questions for 75 minutes. I didn't do well enough to go directly onsite, so I had to do a phone interview as well. I did well and was offered to go to onsite. Recruiter didn't reach out again until 3 weeks later to connect me with the scheduling coordinator, and then when I gave them my availabilities they ghosted me again. Still haven't heard back from them. Would not recommend this place.
Tesla - Did not have high hopes due to bad rep. Spoke with the HM and got really interested in the team. The interview was mostly trivia and discussions. I really liked how he conducted the interview. Felt like a conversation and he really wanted to get to know me. The next step was supposed to be a take home challenge, and that's when it fell apart. The challenge was supposed to be completed in 24 hours. I scheduled it for sunday, and sunday rolled around and no challenge email. Finally received the email 15 min before the deadline on monday. The recruiter emailed me and asked if I could still work on the challenge, and I was like, nah bro. Got a rejection email a week later.
Apple - Received offer. Longest interview experience ever, and the recruiter really liked to call without setting up a time. It started with a 30 min HM call. It was mostly behavioral questions with a little sql trivia. At the end of the interview, the HM said he had to interview a couple more candidates and will get back to me soon. A week and a half later I got a random call from the recruiter to set up a technical interview. The interview had 2 engineers. It was 45 min and mostly discussed about my previous experience and projects with a LC easy at the end. A few days later the recruiter called and tried to schedule the onsite with me. He rushed me to give him availabilities that were max 2 weeks out. The onsite was 7 interviews. All of them 30 min long and basically all behavioral except for 2 interviews that included LC easy. I met with everyone on the team and anyone that I might have to work with on the job. A week and a half later, interviewer scheduled a meeting with the HM. I thought I was getting an offer but nope. 2 weeks later the recruiter told me they were still interviewing other candidates and asked me to be patient. At that point I basically decided I was the backup and gave up on Apple. Another week passed by and the recruiter came back with an offer. He pressured me to make a decision then and there because they were in a rush. LOL
Google - Received offer. Best interview experience after LinkedIn. The interview process was pretty long, but the recruiters were very transparent and gave me updates along the way. All of the interviewers also felt experienced and super nice. The interviews were mostly LC mediums with 1 extremely hard one. Every interview was structured like this: start as easy and slowly add constraints to build up to the finally question. The behavioral round was weird though. Felt like the interviewer was just reading off the screen and wasn't really listening to me. Probably someone new to interviewing. Exactly 1 week after my onsite, I got an email from recruiter saying HC approved me for L3. It's a down-level, but still better than my current job. At that time Apple was looking promising for an offer so I rushed my recruiter to get me team matched. I secured a team after meeting with 3 teams in 2 weeks. Got the written offer 2 days later.
My Take Away
- Leetcode Premium is totally worth it for lazy bums like me. The company tagged questions were enough to help me learn and practice major ds and algo.
- Interviewing with random companies that you don't care about is a great way to practice
- Need to practice system design more. I got lucky because Apple and Google both didn't care for system design for lower levels, otherwise I wouldn't have gotten any offer.
- Luck plays a major role, so just keep interviewing.
Feel free to ask me any questions if my post didn't answer them.
TC for the TC or GTFO folks
3 yoe
Current - 130 ish
New - 202 front loaded
#apple #tesla #swe #google #interview #robinhood #doordash #facebook #linkedin
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Levels.fyi - Compare career levels across companies
My Approach to System Design
comments
Guessing you just got lucky/unlucky on which ones your interviewers picked.
The questions on LC lists are there because people have reported seeing them. So they ARE representative of the questions asked overall.
Can you DM the list of questions or you solved major google tagged ones.
I have a bit of experience for unknown companies, an internship at an international company, and one at a FAANG where I’ll start working soon.
The only recruiters reaching out to me on LN are from at most medium sized companies and definitely not from tech companies.