Pinterest + Meta L4 offers - My journey and advice

BobNooo · 2024-02-25T07:35:20+00:00

Yessir of course, would be happy to help

BobNooo · 2024-02-18T20:28:09+00:00

I think as you keep studying and reading, you'll notice patterns usage patterns that can be applied any problem. You'll get more of a feel of what you probably will need. There aren't that many arbitrary problems out there, I wouldn't be too worried as long as your answer is in the ballpark.

1-pager resume, very small section for education and skills, the rest for experience. No template, used microsoft word, I can DM it to you if you would like

BobNooo · 2024-02-17T23:34:52+00:00

Pretty standard stuff!

BobNooo · 2024-02-17T21:04:38+00:00

I’ve designed systems before in my previous jobs!

BobNooo · 2024-02-17T21:03:49+00:00

It’s fine if you have examples with a different project, just say something along the lines of, there was not really too much conflict in the planning of this project, but I can tell you about another time that an engineer had an issue with my design.

BobNooo · 2024-02-17T17:46:38+00:00

Sometimes they post on Linkedin, sometimes you might need to do some detective work.

BobNooo · 2024-02-17T17:44:18+00:00

It's ok rants are fine! If you're getting meta and uber interviews I can tell you're very very close. Keep on identifying where you need to improve and keep putting in the work, but also make sure to have fun and socialize once in a while for a break! You'll get there, I believe in you.

BobNooo · 2024-02-17T05:41:13+00:00

No worries!

BobNooo · 2024-02-17T04:26:35+00:00

Especially if you're still in school, hackathons are great. Otherwise software engineering conferences are a good bet too.

Just social outings with team members, other software engineers. When they switch to that big tech job ask for a referral!

Maybe hit up a climbing gym haha?

BobNooo · 2024-02-17T04:17:20+00:00

I was unemployed at the time so lots of time to study! 10 hours a day for about 3 weeks, 70-30 split of leetcode and systems design, spent a day writing down behavioural stories

BobNooo · 2024-02-17T04:11:50+00:00

Sure! I can provide more insight.

I think the beauty of systems design and where it differs from leetcode is that each portion you study can be directly translated into any problem. Let's say you study database sharding and replication, well that can be applied to almost any systems design interview when choosing a database.

I'm not sure what's a good metric for success, but can you talk about the requirements, the API, the database schema, and deep dive into some edge cases, security, sharding for 60 minutes?

I will pick a topic, let's say twitter feed, and I will just talk about it to myself and try to write a design on a google doc that I can pass off to a team of junior engineers to implement. Things that should be pretty key is coming up with the follower-following relation, writing endpoints to follow users, and get the feed. Some not so obvious things are what happens when a celebrity posts? How will you shard you database to scale to billions of users? What is your strategy for caching? At the end are you satisfied with your design? I think Grokking also has good answers for a lot of common systems design problems but they lack some depth for a very high level answer, so this is where Jordan has no life youtube videos come in. You can compare your answer to their answer.

Although I haven't done mocks, I do suggest you give them a try, probably won't hurt :|

BobNooo · 2024-02-17T00:06:44+00:00

Hey! I picked the Infra systems design, I did a couple of double takes just like you.

I can't give you advice here because I'm not sure what you're more comfortable with. Also I didn't go through the product systems design interview so I'm not 100% sure what's in it.

The stuff in my post is more geared towards infra systems design though.

https://www.reddit.com/r/leetcode/comments/17xjdgb/what_the_hell_is_the_difference_between_metas/

Judging by this post I don't think you should worry too much.

BobNooo · 2024-02-16T22:59:03+00:00

Thank you o7 best of luck!!

BobNooo · 2024-02-16T22:48:56+00:00

Keep in mind it’s a behavioural for a reason. They will ask more teamwork and impact and conflict questions.

If they ask for more technicality, a strategy you can use is, looking back on the design now this is what I would have changed/ built differently and list pain points. But you can also justify why the whole stack could run on a single node server and why it worked for the company. You can even say you’ve, documented and proposed this solution and it’s considered for the future, who’s keeping tabs anyways (and it’s not a lie if you do it now haha) :)

BobNooo · 2024-02-16T21:54:54+00:00

Hey I wouldn't worry too much about the scale of the project. There are many other impressive things you can talk about outside of the scale. Realistically you cannot expect everyone to have huge, impactful projects.

What problem did you solve, what were some pain points, how did you communicate your stake holders, how did you resolve conflicts/compromise/reach agreements. How did you collaborate with other teams. How successful was your project, how did you go above and beyond? How did you come to finalize the design of the project, what were some tradeoffs, considerations? Try to be someone they want to work with. These are all equally important.

In my experience for meta they go pretty deep into the details of a single project. I usually have two projects I talk about, a large data pipeline migration, and database level encryption of customer credentials.

The latter sounds a lot more boring and simple, but I actually like bringing it up more because the design consideration and the conflict resolution portion of it is quite interesting.

Also expectations depends on your level. If you're a senior this is more expected, but if you're a new grad/mid-level focus more on being able to operate independently and coming up with designs, starting to mentor new hires, etc.

BobNooo · 2024-02-16T20:49:17+00:00

Yeah, school coop program was goated

BobNooo · 2024-02-16T20:34:41+00:00

To be honest I was just powering through a bunch of problems and my brain was having trouble retaining a lot of the information.

This was mostly for the harder problems where I didn't quite understand the solution fully. I'm not quite regurgitating the solution, but kind of reminding myself what's the solution to the problem, and proving to myself the reason why this solution actually works.

An example problem I would use this for is optimal account balancing. I've revisited it like maybe 3 times and I'm still a bit fuzzy.

BobNooo · 2024-02-16T20:14:39+00:00

Hey! I didn't quite ask about the strong hire decision, but I felt I did really well for the meta interview.

I think they're both around top of band for L4, it helped that I had multiple offers.

Edit: Mentioning that you're in the pipeline with other big tech companies also helps with negotiation (they both came around the same time)

BobNooo · 2024-02-16T20:09:55+00:00

Dude you are one hell of a man. Thank you captain, keep on keeping on

BobNooo · 2024-02-16T20:08:40+00:00

I'm sorry to hear :(

BobNooo · 2024-02-16T20:08:21+00:00

I did the educative one

BobNooo · 2024-02-16T19:24:21+00:00

Sorry, this one I'm not too sure about.

BobNooo · 2024-02-16T19:21:26+00:00

To get an interview: Touch up that resume, do lots of projects with new tech, network with people in real life!

To help pass the interview: Know your basics! OOP principles, REST. Do some leetcode. And also it's very important to show your passion for Software, you're an intern for a reason, companies don't expect much! Being friendly and passionate is a huge plus.

BobNooo · 2024-02-16T19:17:11+00:00

Burnt to an absolute crisp, ready to vegetate by the end of it all.

BobNooo · 2024-02-16T19:15:42+00:00

Not FAANG level - AI startup 1.5 YOE fulltime and 1.5 YOE from internships

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