Interviewing Q&A and Videos

In one of Rahul's videos [1], he mentions his interview journey when he had ~3 YOE and how he interviewed for a Meta E5 SWE position. I interviewed for Meta this year w/ 3 YOE similarly and they would not consider me for E5. This is also similar to most other people I know with 3 YOE. Was it because he had a previous internship at Meta as well as his many other internships? I know Alex also interviewed at Meta with 3 YOE and was down-leveled. Rahul also mentioned he received an L3 offer at Google (which makes no sense btw!). I'm curious to know how there was such a large variability in the offer levels. Thanks! [1]

My initial question was “When given a take-home assignment, what is a reasonable turnaround time to get it back to them?” I now know it’s within a week. I was given the assignment to create a basic Django app and was told to spend no more than 3 hours on it. Here’s the short text of the assignment description: > Table Metadata Extractor (Python) > > Please provide a Python Django application that has one API endpoint which accepts a database connection string from your DB of choice (Redshift, BigQuery, Snowflake, MySQL, Postgres), connects to the database using SQLAlchemy and returns a list of the TableMetadata data objects (see below) for all tables in the database. > > TableMetadata = { > > columns: List[ColumnMetadata] > > num_rows: int > > schema: str > > database: str > > } > > ColumnMetadata = { > > col_name: str > > col_type: str > > } > > Bonus points for: > > · Instructive error messages for improper connection strings or other invalid input > > · A solution that is efficient As a Data Engineer/Analyst, I haven’t done web-dev stuff in years and have never used Django. My immediate instinct upon reading this project description was to find a resource to learn Django online. I’m not sure this is the right instinct, because software is about doing more than learning as Alex has mentioned so many times. The way I see it, I have 3 ways to approach this assignment: The way I just mentioned. Go down a learning path (hopefully not a rabbit hole), learn about Django and try completing the assignment. Dive right in, try building the solution from scratch, Googling and ChatGPTing liberally. Don’t do the assignment, spare myself the time and headache, and beef up my Python web-dev skills for the future. The first approach requires the most upfront time. The second might be longer or shorter than the first. And the third doesn’t require any upfront time but requires a commitment to being in a much better position to do the assignment in future. This is the second time in a couple of months I’ve been in this position since I was given an assignment for a different company to build a Flask app and did a shoddy job with it. My first question is, which of the 3 options should I do to address this time-sensitive situation? My second is, how should I address this situation long-term? Building some web-dev projects in Python with Flask/Django/FastAPI seems pretty logical. I don’t get to work with them at work, but I could spend a few weeks building stuff with them. I guess that’s the answer, the key is to avoid tutorial hell. My third is, how should I think about take-home assignments in general? Should they stretch me a lot in terms of learning new things or conversely, should I be, say, 80% comfortable with what I need to do, just stretching a bit here and there to do stuff? Thanks!

Can you please share strategies in place for career growth ( L5 -> L6) along side interview prep ( L5 / L6 ) for a FAANG+. Goal: L6 at FAANG+, either direct or L5 -> L6. Reason: More TC Timeline: Not urgent, just waiting for the right opportunity.

I'm a Data Engineer looking to break into FAANG. As such, my time outside of work right now is spent applying to jobs, asking people for referrals, and networking. When I have interviews, my focus shifts to Leetcode. I really want to build a side-project though both because it's fun and because it will help me perform better at future jobs. My (common) issue is this: where do I start? Not in terms of the problem I am solving. I have a super-smart friend who's a lawyer and an MBA who's into fantasy sports and he has neither the time nor the ability to create an app. I feel like I could just generate a bunch of different ideas with him and pick the one most interesting to me. I mean in terms of tech area. Alex and Rahul are both mobile developers and that naturally lends itself to great apps. I know Alex has mentioned that in a vacuum, it's better to focus on front-end for side-projects. I have no experience with front-end or mobile, some back-end dev experience and a fair bit of data. I could build a data eng project. Start Data Engineering has some great projects on his blog () and there's definitely plenty of examples online (e.g. ). My question is whether I should build a DE project. I'm not particularly wedded to DE because I feel like I want to do more SWE work and less business analyst work. Above all, I want to get into FAANG for the boost to my learning, career, and comp. DE is prob the easiest way of getting there but again, not wedded to it. So I see my options as a) doing a DE project (maybe using the projects above to get my feet wet); b) doing a full-stack project (hard to do a back-end only project I think); c) mobile? (Alex and Rahul are tempting me). Is there any advantage to mobile over a web-dev project? If I do b or c, I'm concerned about falling into tutorial-hell or at least taking too long to learn before building. I'm tempted by a full-stack course like Zero To Mastery's full stack course, but it's 40 hrs, and I know it's prob not necessary. Just want to add that I'm a newb for side-projects and I'm aware that I can and will experiment with multiple project types once I get started. Sorry for the unstructured thoughts here. My brain works on NoSQL, not SQL ;)

Hi All, I have a question on competing offers. Do recruiters ask to show the competing offer email or letters when I negotiate? I read it is not legal to ask for it or ask for the previous salary. I wanted to find out more on this, do they ask for more details of competing offers and should I plan to show any details for that? Also, would you mind sharing your experience on how you handled negotiation when trying to switch teams within the same company and negotiating a better salary within same company with an competing offer from outside the company. Thank you!

Just another laid-off SWE here. I have an interview coming up at a popular tech company. How can I explain getting laid off in the interview? I am concerned that there is a stigma in tech that layoffs target low performers, especially since only part of my team got laid off. They never told us the layoff criteria, but I think I got targeted because I was more junior. I don't want to reveal my level for the company I'm applying to.