🗑️👩💻👎 Most Tech Interview Prep is GARBAGE
💡 What’s Wrong with Most Advice?
👶 It’s aimed at entry & junior level positions.
👨💻 Don’t spend all of your time on LeetCode.
🏛️ Modern interview theory
⏱️ Companies have a maximum of 6 hours to evaluate a candidate. This is not enough.
- 🔎 Without sufficient time to evaluate real skills, proxies must be used instead.
- 🎭 Proxies should be very difficult to imitate.
⌨️ Coding is necessary, but not sufficient.
👴 For senior positions, companies are looking for applicants who can contribute meaningfully to projects that will take many people years to complete.
📚 The best proxies for system design & leadership are stories of past experiences building big systems and leading teams of engineers.
🗣️ Interview Phases
- 💻 Coding
- ⚙️ System Design
- 🤝 Leadership
🎭 Behavioral vs Situational
⚙️ System design questions are behavioral questions disguised as situational questions.
❓ Situational: what would you do in this situation?
🗣️ Behavioral: tell me about a time when you were in this situation and tell me exactly what you did.
🔍 System design questions aim to discover whether you’ve built systems like this in the past.
❓ Example System Design Follow-up Questions
- 🌐 How can it be scaled to billions of users?
- ⏳ How would you ensure uptime & resiliency?
- 🚀 How do you ensure it’s fast in the presence of massive amounts of globally distributed data?
🤝 Leadership: Good & Bad Example Answers
🗣️ Tell me about a time you disagreed strongly with your team.
❌ ⌨️ Tabs vs spaces
✅ 🧪 Refactoring for testability vs ⏰ speed of delivery for deadlines.
❌ 📟 Emacs vs VI
✅ 🔄 Migrating to an async API to systematically eliminate operational problems vs 🧩 focusing on solving those short term problems
✅ ⬇️ Low level vs ⬆️ high level API designs
⚙️ How to Prepare
⏱️ Allocate your preparation time according to the level of position you’re targeting.
| Level | Coding | Design | Behavioral |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry | 90% | 0% | 10% |
| Junior | 75% | 0% | 25% |
| Mid | 40% | 20% | 40% |
| Senior | 30% | 30% | 40% |
| Principal | 20% | 40% | 40% |
📖 Behavioral Advice: Tell a Good Story
🎭 Create a stable of stories demonstrating that you have the experience the company needs.
📚 Book Recommendations
- 💻 Software Engineering Interviews:
- 👨💻 Cracking the Coding Interview: 150 Programming Interview Questions and Solutions by Gayle Laakmann McDowell. A great resource for interview prep! 🚀
- 👍 Ace the Software Engineering Interview: An Interview Preparation Framework to Land the Job You Will Love. 🌟
- ⚙️ System Design:
- 💾⬆️🛡️ Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems by Martin Kleppmann. A deep dive into distributed systems. 📚
- 🖥️🔑 System Design Interview - An Insider’s Guide by Alex Xu. 💡
- 🚀 Leadership in Software Engineering:
- 👶⬆️👨💻📈 The Staff Engineer’s Path by Tanya Reilly. For senior engineers looking to level up! 📈
- 🤝 Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager by James Stanier. A practical guide to management. ✨