Interviewing Q&A and Videos

Hi Taro. I got laid off in April from AWS. I interned at NASA JPL and I am considering going back fulltime and continuing to apply to tech companies. I don't have an offer but I am hopeful I would be able to connect with a team since I interned there one year and have 1.5 YOE at AWS. I have some concerns about joining JPL, because they are prototype and research focused. They don't have many production systems or serve customer traffic. They also operate mostly in small and independent groups so the engineering standards can differ a lot. The research group I interned at had poor engineering and code quality compared to AWS. The engineering environment is different than corporate. Some technologies and experiences missing at JPL that are common in tech are pipelines (CI/CD), TPS, tickets, oncall, debugging large and distributed systems, customer traffic, metrics, operational reviews. JPL pays poorly and has slow growth. You can be there 10 years and make less than an SDE-1 in FAANG. I don't have any visa issues. Finances are not a problem. Currently I have very low expenses and good savings because I didn't RTO and I am living with my parents. I have 1.5 YOE at AWS and 3 years of internships before that. I see the market picking up so I am tempted to keep trying for a tech company. Another thing to consider is that there is a lot of inertia when you join a job. I will have little time to look for other jobs in the first few months because I will be busy onboarding. I will also have less time to look for jobs and study for interviews. Please give advice :)

I have to negotiate for my offer from Uber today, verbal offer chat will be today Context I am SDE2 at Amazon and was promoted so I have the low band base salary Uber is the only interview I cracked, others were a weak yes and didn’t proceed to the offer so no other offers to negotiate against This is what recruiter said which has me confused: They do not pay competitive salary as the other top tech companies, their pay is still in top 70%. Starting base mentioned was less than my current salary. I am not sure if this is a tactic for negotiations or the market salaries right now. (Not the same on Levels fyi and I confirmed from someone working at Uber, their pay was definitely comparable to Amazon band, may be even more) Unsure how strong I should approach it, if I am switching, I need it to be at least a bump in my salary. I want to ask for at least a some bump in base. Previously, when I have negotiated the final offer was a little less than what I asked but XXk+ more than what they first told me at the first call. Would like to negotiate as much as possible, unsure if they consider other competing offers or my currently salary to counter.

I am a Sr Engineering manager with 10 yrs of engineering management in Tier 2 type of companies. I am thinking to switch now and want to work for more tech geared companies. Do they ever hire M1 from outside?

How do you choose a team at Google or Meta? There might be a ton of internal teams that you would have no idea about if you are not working there. Most people only know about Instagram, YouTube and other user facing products. How did the folks working at those companies select which team they want to join? I was asked which team I would like to join in my first conversation with a Google Recruiter.

I got an interview call for SE position at Tesla and am considering to interview at Tesla. Is Tesla considered a good tech company to work for?

I had an interview yesterday with the Head of Analytics at a unicorn, a senior product analyst, and a Data Eng team lead. They were all in the same interview. I'd like to thank them for their time and to show my interest in the role. However, I don't have their email addresses. They are easily locatable on LinkedIn though. Should I just ask the HR person to thank them for me, or is it better to send them a request on LinkedIn, thanking them within it? My intuition is the former, as the letter seems a little too pushy. Open to any thoughts and suggestions!

Is it common for candidates applying to FAANG companies to receive a timed online assignment as the first step in the interview process? Does this usually indicate that the company views the candidate as less qualified, compared to the typical recruiter phone screen involving two DSA questions? Is there any way to avoid this? Or beggers can't be choosers and we gotta just go through it anyway.

Hi all, In the next couple days (2-3 days) will be the deadline for my current job offer (let's call it "Company 1"). I already asked them for extension twice and they said next Monday (02/12) would be the final date and the offer cannot be extended further. The best thing about this offer is the company is fully remote, but it's a startup with unknown plan for IPO. There is another company (publicly-traded company - let's call it "Company 2") that I already finished the interview with good feedbacks, but HR told me the hiring manager literally interviewed me as the very first candidate and would want to have 2 more weeks to interview other candidates too, but I'm in the pipeline for consideration. Should I accept the offer from "Company 1" (the startup above)? WLB seems to be better than the "Company 2". Both companies offer "Unlimited PTO" (for better or worse) but at least the 1st is fully remote. For comp number, the publicly-traded "Company 2" definitely has higher total comp and their stock is skyrocketing in the market right now. "Company 1" has higher base salary but paper stocks. I wonder if the hiring manager for "Company 2" is interviewing further, does that mean my positive feedback was good but not great? Should I keep interviewing or just accepting 1st offer? Any thoughts on what to do next?

Hi! I have a question regarding Meta's interview selection/rejection criteria. I recently interviewed with Meta for E4 Software Engineer role and I actually did well on the interview. I answered both questions with optimal algorithms and also did everything that is expected of the candidate in a good interview (like asking clarifying questions, making a framework for the code to be written/ pseudo code, with the explanation of the process of how I came up with the solution, writing optimal code, discussing time complexity and verification/ dry run - everything within that time limit). I received a rejection from my recruiter. I can't think of anything being the reason for the rejection except that I have been a bit nervous during the interview (but did manage to get everything done still). Is it normal for Meta to reject a candidate in the screen in spite of such performance? What else would they be expecting to proceed with a candidate? It was not easy for me to get this opportunity to interview with Meta, as I didn't have any previous big tech experience. I'm kind of losing hope on my journey to crack a big tech with this experience. To be honest, I kind of feel like I am being discriminated against. Can anyone please share your thoughts on this experience?

I had to do some firefighting at work the other day for a critical pipeline that broke. I have interviews coming up and am concerned that I'll have another crisis to fight when my interviews are scheduled. Are there any tips for handling these situations well? I don't think anything will come up on interview day, but am worried. I guess if something does, it all comes down to making the judgment call about what is more important, the specific issue, or my onsite, and then go from there. Just wondering if anyone has anything to add to that.

I’ve come to realize more and more that the greatest thing holding me back by far as a software engineer has been perfectionism. By perfectionism, I mean the mental attitude that says that what I have done isn’t good enough so I need to spend more time on it, or that I’m not ready to do something. This attitude is pretty much the opposite of Meta’s “Move fast and break things”. Here are a few of the ways that this mindset has hobbled me throughout my career: University (I studied Engineering): thinking I had to read the textbook and do all the assigned questions. My GPA suffered. In reality, my time would have been better spent doing past tests/exams and forming better friendships and study groups with other students to learn what was most valuable to know. I’m speaking from both a GPA-maximizing viewpoint, but also from a long-term viewpoint in the case of better relationships with classmates. Immediate Post-University: Thinking that my coding skills weren’t good enough and that I needed to do a 6-month bootcamp which I did. Hindsight is 20/20, but getting my first job and working from there would probably have been better. First job: Struggling with moving fast. I was at a tiny (<10 people) start-up and they wanted speed. I struggled with the pace they wanted because of things like writing formulaic unit tests that didn’t add much value and needing to constantly walk through my code with a debugger. I do believe that this particular company had unrealistic, unhealthy expectations for a newbie, but I also believe I could have moved faster. General learning: Prioritizing online courses over side projects. Job Hunting: Aiming to get done 150 interview questions before applying, rather than applying and doing mock interviews from the get-go. I believe perfectionism is particularly harmful in tech compared to other industries since things change so fast. Maybe this is better answered by a life coach or therapist, but what are some things I can do to limit the pernicious effects of this mindset?

I work at a startup hiring senior software engineers. I have less than 1 year experience but I was asked to take technical interviews. I explained that they have wide skill set and I might not be the best person to interview them. They told me it's not a problem and that I can ask them questions related to what I already know. So I interviewed a PayPal software engineer today and he has 6 years of experience. I've asked JS/TS specific questions like "here's a sample code, tell me what's wrong with it?" and I noticed that the candidate couldn't answer these questions. He started to get defensive and said that I shouldn't be asking these type of intricate questions given that it's easy to resolve the problematic code by relying on code editors' intelligence or simply googling the bug. In the end, we gave him a DSA question which he solved in 15 min. I want to hear opinions of engineers here because I was expecting a senior engineer to know the "gotchas" of languages they have experience with and not just be good at DSA. I know it's important to have confidence in interviews, but is it okay to straight-up tell the interviewer to not ask language specific questions? Is asking language specific questions not the right way to evaluate someone's knowledge?

While talking with developers I heard a lot that most of them prefer to be on backend as compared to frontend? I know it’s everyone’s choice who love to do what. But still in my experience developers are more biased to be on backend side compared to frontend.

I am a software Engineer with 9 years of experience. I started my career as a front-end engineer (worked on Ember.js) and did some Ruby on Rails. Later, I worked on technologies like Node.js, Ruby on Rails, Elixir Phoenix, CI/CD work, and React. In this period, I worked on many technologies but today when I ask myself I feel like I don't know any of these technologies perfectly because I've continuously hopped onto different technologies. For example, 2 years back I worked on Rails and last year I worked on Elixir. This year I worked on React design systems with a Node.js backend (without touching Elixir or Rails). Now, when I see any job description about Elixir or Ruby on Rails I don't have the confidence to apply to these jobs as I don't remember much about these technologies (even though I had worked on good tasks with that technology earlier). I feel like I am good at nothing. I don't know my niche. How can I know my strength?

My bottle neck is debugging when you can't run code. When practicing I am able to run code and add prints and trace the code. But often in a real interview you have to debug through pure reasoning which is hard My performance is getting hit because in DSA I often get an answer 95% correct but the interviewer tells me I have a bug and I find it really really hard to trace the bug especially in recursion problems

Just wondering if FAANG companies hire engineers at Staff level (or higher). What kind of experience do they look for when hiring folks from outside?

I haven't touched leetcode yet and don't have a CS background. I'm not sure whether to use my free time to work on a personal project or if I should use the time to take up a DS & Algos udemy course, Algoexpert, etc and just leetcode until I can apply for the big G. I guess where I stand with that is I'm wondering if there is more value in it than a skill that just vaporizes after passing the leetcode interviews.

Hi Taro community, Seeking your help in evaluating two offers that I received from two start-up companies. (1) In general, in such situations how do you suggest researching about the companies and determining which company and offer is better. (2) I am also concerned how my future job potential will be affected and so I want to take the decision accordingly. (3) In this particular case, my offers are as follows, company A - Unicorn (post money valuation: $1B-$10B), Industry: Ad Tech (ML and cloud infra based), Last funding type: Series C, Total funding amount: $190M, Estimated revenue range: $1M - $10M, Founded in 2013 by ex-googler, - I have seen several folks joined from FAANG companies (eg, Google) - Offer: base $160K, bonus: 24K, Equity: $88K (not sellable now, but the company is expecting to go for IPO in one year) company B - Emerging Unicorn (post money valuation: $500M-$1B), Industry: Healthcare/AI, Last funding type: Series B, Total funding amount: $120M, Estimated revenue range: $1M - $10M, Founded in 2017 - Among big techs, I have found just one person from AWS who joined this company - offer: base $190K, no bonus, Equity: 114K (not sellable now, the company is expecting to go for IPO in 2-4 years). I may be able to negotiate this offer. Thanks in advance for any kind of suggestions/comments.

My latest position was SDE II at Amazon, backend. I was laid off. I have not worked for 2 years. I find myself struggling with which project I should talk about in my interviews. Here are the projects I had worked on. A project where I investigated how to create and analyze the right data to optimize something. This was at a previous company where we shipped highly technical software, and the software had nothing to do with the web. The project wasn't one where I built much of anything; the result was just an independent Python script. The technicals were in the weeds though. But I would say I spent more time on the project than the work needed me to. A React Native side project. I did not launch the app, but the app worked on testing. My favorite project, as I learned a lot about planning, learning a new stack, and structuring my code. However, it's a side project and the stack is not related to what I mainly worked on at Amazon. My 1st project at Amazon. A high level design of the project was done for me. The project was very simple technically: move a module from one service to another to support the deprecation of the former service. There were some choices of wiring where data goes in the new setup, but that was about it for the complexity. I worked with another team to discuss the data flow. I also broke down the project into small parts for a new grad SDE to do. I personally saw through the project to its successful launch. My 2nd project at Amazon. I was working under another SDE II and he was the one who had done all the design, assigned me the parts to work on, and drove the successful launch. I remember the end business product well, but what I do not remember is the key high level code logic behind the scenes that make it work. As a consequence, even though I remember some parts of what I personally had worked on, I cannot drive a coherent narrative about them. My 3rd project at Amazon. It was the first project at work I designed from scratch. I communicated with the technical project manager to get clear the requirements and thought about all the cases to cover to make a working design. I do not remember all the details of the cases I needed to cover but I can talk about them at a high level. The biggest downside of this project is that it was cancelled mid-implementation since another project it depended on was cancelled for reasons outside of my control. So this project never launched.

For example, to find the k largest element in an array, the straightforward approach is using a minheap, if you know the solution, can code up in 5 mins. So would the interviewer ask for alternatives like quickselect?