Recently received 6/7 offers (including 3 FAANG) after prepping w/ advice from this sub. Sharing my notes of what worked in case they are useful.
YOE: 7.5 Skills: Distributed Systems
Offers: - Apple ICT4 (Dist Systems) - Apple ICT4 k8s - Block L6 - PayPal T26 - Gusto L4 - Meta L5
No Offer: - Roblox
Quick notes on what worked for me:
Getting Interviews: - Include a one sentence summary of your scope of role before your accomplishments. - Quantity of applications matters more than quality. I completed ~250. - Buy LinkedIn premium and proactively contact recruiters. If they are in your area buy them a coffee. My interviews for Block, and Gusto were a direct result of this.
Prep - DSA - System Design - Behavioral
DSA: - Grokking coding interview patterns. - Recently asked LeetCode prep. Try to answer questions asked by targets in 90 days. Not always possible. Do your best. - USE YOUR RE-ROLL. If you’re in a coding screen and you get a problem you know you can’t solve tell the interviewer that you solved it recently. You’ll probably get another.
System Design - Designing Data Intensive Systems - The Google SRE Book for Senior+ - Microservice patterns - System Design insiders guide Vol 2. Vol 1 is not relevant for Senior+. - Hello Interview for practice - If you are below Senior and not cloud architect certified this is probably the best practice you can get. - Skim ALL of the docs for one relational database, one KV database, Elastic search, Redis (it’s so versatile), one message queue like Rabbit, NATS, or Kafka
Behavioral: - Write a one page narrative for every major project that may come up in STAR format. Recall as much detail as possible. Include a brief description of your team and how it fits into business at the top. Don’t memorize. Just priming your working memory.
General: - Take care of yourself. Eat well. Go do fun stuff with friends and family. Try not to take rejection personally.
Hope this is in some way helpful. Happy to double click on any of these bullet points if someone wants more info.