TL;DR laid off couple of months ago, now joining the dark side (by public perception) but I don't care, I feel grateful. Just signed my offer letter for TikTok 2-2 after months of interviewing. I got laid off from a top hedge fund company couple of months ago and been searching ever since. I got an offer from a SF based startup that is about 300k first year TC with 240k but didn't decide to join because of relocation and among other things. I did pass multiple onsites but none of them went to offer stage. Passed the onsite for Robinhood but there were no team that had an opening with my experience. Got verbal offer from SpaceX but got denied after talking with the director. The rejection email was sent 10 days after. Seemed very weird at the time but oh well. Passed the onsite for another hedge fund company but it seems like they want me cheap. They claim that they're looking for someone senior and hanging me in on the thread but screw them, I'm not going to wait for a low ball offer. After sending 150+ applications to hedge fund, big/small tech and startups, I noticed couple of things. 1) Companies know that this is their market and they're not rushing to make a decision anymore. They'll wait for months to look for the 100% right person. Even if its 95% fit, they'll still look around. But for startups, since they're moving fast, its not the case. My first startup offer came in 2 weeks after my layoffs. 2) I wasn't asked any LC hard end questions at all, which is good since I really hate getting asked those type of questions. Most of them were LC medium or hard on the easy side with enough time. 3) I thought most of the companies would ask LC type questions but its not the case. Some companies had their own questions prepared for their own product, or take home exams to filter, which means code quality comes in handy. 4) Since my YOE wasn't quite senior in most places, I was instantly rejected pretty much from any company that didn't meet the minimum YOE. Even when I apply to mid level engineer, I had so many instant rejections. 5) At this market, 6 YOE+ people might have it easier than mid level engineers and I feel very sorry for new grad or interns. For me, it was still hard but did get some initial calls. 6) I got to travel for 3 onsites which is nice. Reminded me pre-covid era. TikTok Offer: Level: 2-2 (Senior) Title: Full Stack Engineer Location: Seattle Base: 242k Stock: 76k per year Sign On: 30k Bonus: 25% First year TC: ~408k YOE: 4 Former TC: 360k Feel free to spam 996 down below
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Can u share tiktok interview topics/patterns?
I had 6 round of interviews and since I was applying for full stack role, they asked about bunch of questions about in that field. 4 technical round and 2 behavioral round which consisted of 1 system design, and 3 LC type questions. The LC questions were the very common ones but there was one specific question involved JS. Most questions involved recursion or DFS type of knowledge.
Congratulations! Are you looking to stay in tech now or would you go back to a hedge fund in the future?
Right now, I feel like I'll stay in big tech sector or startup world. At least working at tiktok will impact many people whereas building internal tools for a hedge fund will only impact that firm. Hedge funds are not doing gods work. They even say that themselves.
lol which companies are doing gods work
You got laid off from a hedge fund?
Yeap. Our whole team.
Congratulations on finding a job that is a good fit for you. Who cares if others think you joined the "dark side."
Congratulations OP 🎉 All high TC jobs are in Chinese companies now, they want to get all the engineering knowledge they can. So don’t feel bad about that.
How did u study for system design and what sort of design questions were most commonly asked?
Answer these questions OP
System design honestly doesn't bother me that much since I did numerous production level side projects which was extremely helpful in architecture and DB design which they ask about a lot. Working in a startup also helped tremendously since I didn't gain those kinds of distributed system architecture while I was at google. In terms of preparation, I read the grokking the system design interview but didn't help much since it was very surface level understanding of the tech. Watched bunch of specific design interviews. For instance, robinhood asks about stock exchange app design so watched couple of those before the interview, but this question didn't come up lol. Read Alex Xu's book and watched his channel. They were helpful I guess but I don't think these will replace real life experiences I gained from startups and side projects. Hope this helps.