Summary of my technical onsite interviews in the Bay Area
After having given 75+ technical onsite interviews in the Bayarea, below is the summary of my experience.
#Google Irrespective of how smart and prepared you are, you need 200% luck as well. Please do not look at the LinkedIn profiles of people who are going to interview you. I did once and I was so stuck with imposter syndrome that I could not even write simple BFS in 1 hour. Be prepared for totally out of the syllabus questions. I was once asked about the purpose of each field in a tcp/ip dump and I was not prepared for that.
#Facebook You must know the most optimized solutions to all leetcode problems. Otherwise, there is no way you can think, design, and complete coding for 2 problems in 35 minutes.
#Amazon If you are being interviewed by experienced AWS folks, you better be an astronaut, who served in Afghanistan for 10 years, and also holds the record of jumping from a plane at the highest altitude. Anything less will not impress them. Also, out of 100 Amazon recruiters who will reach out to you at the same time, 95 will ghost you.
#Netflix Was always scared to take their interviews because of their well known hire and fire culture and too many negative Glassdoor reviews.
For last few years they have constantly been working on improving their PR and hopefully have become little friendly for people on H1B work visa.
#Apple You can take interviews with 10 different teams and have 10 totally different experiences. Apple works as a big conglomerate of thousands of mini-startups without much standardization.
#LinkedIn Focus on behavior and soft skills as well. It’s not good enough if you are just very technical and a bad person to work with. Kudos for emphasizing on behavior.
#Oracle During my first interview at Oracle, USA, I met 4 people who were with Oracle for more than 25 years. Usually no silly leetcode or tricky questions.
Very matured, experienced, and technical interviewers. This is just talking about core database teams.
Interviews with Cloud teams will be very similar to Amazon interviews.
#Twitter You will fall in love with everyone you talk to. Very nice people.
#Uber Leetcode hards before IPO. Leetcode mediums after IPO.
#NotDoingSoWellStartups Mostly design questions. They want to make you feel happy and confident, so that you accept their offer.
#DoingGreatStartups Mostly only coding rounds with at least one dynamic programming question. They want the best and don’t mind ripping you apart during the interview.
Of course, recruiter’s valuation of the company = (real valuation) * 10.
#AboutToIPOStartups Many of the interviewers will be literally flying during interviews.
#Startups In general they can let an intern or NCGs ( new college grad ) to interview very senior folks. Sometimes the problem with that is an interviewer will know how to solve a particular problem in just one way and they might or might not like other variations. Sometimes they don’t want to discuss about the problem at length and just want to see lot of code regurgitated.
Merge sort, Binary search, Matrix, List, Map, Heap, BFS, and DFS will make you successful in 95% of the interviews for 100% of the companies. For remaining 5% you need bit of luck. Make sure to pick a programming language that you are very comfortable with.
If you get anything else that’s too hard to solve in 30 minutes, then you and interviewer’s stars were not aligned on that day !
For senior folks, if you can design Uber, Twitter, Facebook, Google Search, LinkedIn, Instagram, Analytics platform, Monitoring platform, or a Streaming platform, you will be just fine.
Please don’t feel bad for failing an interview. Lot of things have to fall in place, in spite of your own efforts.
Most companies will let you take their interview again after 6 months.
