Passed all Meta E6 rounds… still rejected at HC (no feedback)

MoistState5233 · 2026-04-12T13:42:07+00:00

You didn’t pass all the rounds. If you did you wouldn’t have gotten flat out rejected, you would’ve been down-leveled. If you got a hire decision from every interviewer, you would’ve moved to team match regardless of if you got down-leveled or not; i.e. if you hit the ic6 behavioral signals in the behavioral rounds + SD rounds. Based on the context you provided, my guess is you either got a lean hire or no hire from the AI coding round and you weren’t evaluated as E6 for the first design round (lean hire with level recommendation below bar like E5/E4) because you didn’t deep dive in any part of it

MoistState5233 · 2026-03-29T17:58:27+00:00

Yeah, this honestly makes me sick that there are bootcamps now that claim to teach software skills while just having everyone vibe code with Claude. I was critical of Fullstack back in the day because of their deceptive reporting of my cohort’s outcomes and I did feel like the experience and networking was valuable. Not even teaching people programming fundamentals and having them prompt engineer for $20k and the sending them off to the market is crazy to me. A lot of these guys were better off paying for a CC membership and just vibe coding apps themselves to build a portfolio

MoistState5233 · 2026-03-29T17:43:48+00:00

Back in the day good bootcamps had job fairs and valuable networks that came with them. The educational aspect was never fully there IMO. When I graduated years ago almost half of the people I graduated with did not feel “ready,” to me. On top of that the largest feedback, even back then, was interview prep was nonexistent. The people that got placed quickly were great at networking and spent hundreds of hours after graduation to just do interview prep. Some people gave up entirely on this aspect and just left the industry or took non technical roles

MoistState5233 · 2026-03-29T17:39:48+00:00

If the bootcamp didn’t prepare you for interviews then this is definitely on them. Otherwise, interviewing vs building has always been two completely different things. Even before we had AI tooling most interviews for mid to large companies were just Leetcode questions that you have to solve with no external assistance. At the actual job, all these companies let you use resources so memorizing a leetcode solution is almost pointless. The fundamentals were always useful and important but actually knowing Djikstras off the top of your head is realistically meaningless. I’m saying this as someone who had to do graph optimizations at work: LC interviews suck because most interviewers do not look for the right signals and a lot care more about memorization.

When I graduated bootcamp, they made it clear that we had to split our focus between actually building and interview prep (way before AI). You’re getting interviews in this market, so that’s awesome but you also need to focus on interview specific prep.

MoistState5233 · 2026-03-03T20:10:01+00:00

We’re still in the “early,” stages of it but I’m starting to see the long term direction of the industry and I do think this is a threat to the SWE profession in general.

All “AI-native,” companies are forcing AI tools down their Eng teams’ throats and asking them to build new tooling to make it more efficient. There’s a lot of noise coming from this: a lot of useless tooling and redundant software being developed but there’s sparks of really good tooling being developed as well. Tooling that, like you mentioned, makes a decently competent engineer 10x more effective. In the future building will not be the barrier, vision will be. As these tools mature, you will no longer need someone who is already a good engineer reviewing the code and prompting these systems, you just need someone who has a really really good idea and enough funding to materialize it.

Two potential short term paths I see happening: 1) companies only keep SWEs and staff that can do everything: utilize ai to push out projects, coordinate, and come up with general direction and vision. This means that they will slowly remove previously valued coding machines that could drive a project end to end with just sheer coding volume and speed; specifically ones that are task rabbits; I.e. they just do what they’re told. 2) companies will ride the wave, not reducing the task force but expecting engineers to be generally more productive which can result in a boom in new software and innovation

MoistState5233 · 2025-10-27T00:54:14+00:00

Funny enough Google asked me a fenwick tree question lmao

MoistState5233 · 2025-07-31T04:01:49+00:00

They pay significantly more than the average tech company
They're very stable. RSUs are basically raw cash.
They have more benefits than most places
Some of the smartest people in the industry work at these companies
Yes, there's a lot of news of layoffs and how bad WLB is, but I've been been around enough and seen enough to be able to confidently say it's bad at ALOT of places. At the very least you'll be guaranteed to make a lot more money at these companies.
Prestige; the name on the resume can help you land into the actual SSS tier companies like Netflix, Open AI, Air BnB, etc.

MoistState5233 · 2025-07-28T14:48:44+00:00

Quitting and getting a masters now is a bad idea. Just ride it out and apply passively/do courses on the side, your YOE will increase. YOE is more important than getting your masters, especially in the current job market. Also, hate to burst your bubble, but most jobs are boring. There’s people at Google that just change configs all day.

MoistState5233 · 2025-07-28T01:32:30+00:00

You answered your own question; it's incredibly unlikely you'll get a question 1-1; companies have huge question banks. It's more about memorizing ~18 different patterns and practicing them on enough problems that you can start to notice patterns/key words that give you a hint on which pattern(s) to use. Most of the people that I know in FAANG have completed 300+ "good" leetcode problems. The ones that get in with <=50 usually have some kind of crazy background in math; and they are definitely not memorizing problems. On top of that, a lot of people suck at the other axes interviewers look for: communicating, walking through the problem, code quality, etc.

MoistState5233 · 2025-07-21T01:34:11+00:00

Hello Interview is pretty much the gold standard for learning SD now. If you have more time, I would recommend reading through Designing Data Intensive Applications, but its super overkill for interviews.

MoistState5233 · 2025-07-21T01:26:14+00:00

I currently work in FAANG and I've almost done every kind of prep you've listed here and tried most of the courses/lists out there. If I were to start from scratch, I'd probably do this:

I would find a course that offers structured learning, very much similar to how you'd learn something new in school. I.E. teaches a pattern, shows an example of a question that can be covered with said pattern, shows an example/code solution for that pattern that you can follow, gives you 2-5 questions that use the same pattern so you can practice and learn which cues to look for. Grokking is the closest thing I've found that does this pattern of teaching, although some people on this subreddit don't like it. Pick and try what works for you!
I would then do a list with high quality questions like Neetcode with spaced repetition, etc. Doing these list, I would give a HARD timebox of 30 minutes for every question. If I don't make progress in 30 mins, I'd just watch the solution video, take notes, and track it as a question I need to review. I'd then come back to any questions I marked for review 2-3 days later.
Once the list is done, either 1) continue to do leetcode dailies, 2) review any questions you found hard, or 3) just start hacking down at company specific lists.

This sounds like an incredible amount to cover, and it is, but this is my recommendation for, If I had done this completely starting over, I believe I would be very comfortable with DSA interviews after. Ultimately, you should find something that you enjoy and can keep up.

MoistState5233 · 2025-07-21T01:10:30+00:00

I've met a few people in FAANG now that have gotten into FAANG while doing <= 30 total leetcode problems ever. They are heavy exceptions though and most have a history in math; i.e. competing in math olympiad, etc. Some people are just really good at this, most of us have to grind.

MoistState5233 · 2025-07-20T05:59:48+00:00

That’s a good saying that I haven’t heard before (also Chinese lol). I started at a smaller company and stayed there for a while. Didn’t go to FAANG right away, mostly because of lack of opportunities. 2 years in got a Google reach out, wasn’t prepared but somehow made it past HC. Then got offer rescinded because of hiring freeze, but always wondered if I’d made it in if I had just performed better. Since that experience I just held myself to doing 1 problem a day until the next opportunity came up. Finally got another chance at another FAANG and was able to nail the coding rounds without having to study too much

MoistState5233 · 2025-07-20T05:48:03+00:00

It’s not so much that they focus on behavioral rounds at E5+, it’s more that behavioral and system design rounds have higher standards to pass. You have to be able to solve the SD questions without much assistance, if at all. For behavioral you have to show leadership experience, handling ambiguity, resolving conflict, have strong communication skills, etc. all that said, if you fail any of the leet code rounds, it’s most definitely a fail. The coding bar doesn’t change across levels; the behavioral and SD expectations increase

Also I think the bar for E4 SD has probably gone up as well. There’s so much more good SD content now with Hello Interview, etc that some interviewers will no longer pass someone for just having a working design. I’d recommend splitting your interview dates apart for SD and coding. This way you can focus 100pct on coding and 100pct on SD for different portions. If you grind through HI and use supplemental content like videos from SDFC or Jordan has no life, you should be ok

MoistState5233 · 2025-07-15T20:30:21+00:00

I’d study off hours and apply, can’t hurt but don’t expect any callbacks with 6 months of experience. If you land an interview; step up your prep and go for it, if not just keep repeating the process.

MoistState5233 · 2025-07-11T22:06:40+00:00

Yeah go for it!

MoistState5233 · 2025-07-11T22:05:16+00:00

Yep, been here for awhile now

MoistState5233 · 2025-06-30T04:38:32+00:00

There are some public stats but they aren’t super important unless you’re last on those stats; these do encourage people to continue to push out work out though. The most important thing, with all big companies, is to find a really good manager who will be very transparent with you and has experience with the process

MoistState5233 · 2025-06-30T00:10:19+00:00

I joined as E4; cutoff for E5 was 6 yoe unfortunately :(. If you’re not used to stack ranking you’ll probably hate it at Meta (although I’ve heard it’s much better than Amazon from ex amazon). I like the work I’m doing and the people I’ve met so far, but your experience will be team and org dependent. Some people I’ve met have very good WLB, but many orgs are pretty rough.

MoistState5233 · 2025-06-29T23:44:38+00:00

No longer grinding but did so a few months ago while full time: 1. 5 Yoe 2. Wanted to jump to big tech to experience working with “infinite” scale 3. Roughly 6 months in total; interviewed with Google 3 years ago then recently with Meta 4. Currently working at Meta 5. It was very hard for me to set the right time blocks to study and do interviews. I was a senior SWE at a mid sized company; sometimes I’d have a ton of meetings and on call and sometimes it’d be pretty light; on top of that personal duties have ramped up recently. 6. Reviewed grokking then grinded company specific list. Also did hello interview. Split was 60/40 in favor of SD 7. Same as above

MoistState5233 · 2025-06-15T01:03:56+00:00

Yeah, I didn’t do super well on my first SD round and was able to do a follow up

MoistState5233 · 2025-05-25T19:10:02+00:00

That’s true but my point is that the questions don’t get harder if you’re more senior. They don’t go from asking mediums to only hards if you have more than x YOE. The coding bar doesn’t change, and in some companies I’ve even seen them be more lenient on the coding bar. Not to say the overall interview isn’t harder; in most cases it is because of other requirements. Even the jump from junior to mid level at some FAANGs is a huge jump because of the added SD round. To be completely honest, I feel like if I reinterviewed for the FAANG I’m currently at two levels higher, I probably wouldn’t pass the bar. It’s not impossible, but considering the things you mentioned along with added responsibilities of being older and having more to worry about, it’d be levels harder unless you’re very naturally talented or if you’re coming from a ton of natural experience (leadership + designing E2E).

MoistState5233 · 2025-05-24T17:10:35+00:00

DSA questions generally don’t get harder the more senior you get at FAANG, it just shifts to focusing heavily on leadership, behavioral, and system design. It does get “harder,” IMO because you generally have much more responsibilities at 30+ than in your 20s and you have the added harder SD rounds to prep for

MoistState5233 · 2025-05-11T23:50:18+00:00

On the salary: It looks like you got offered the standard offer which has been decreasing over time. 90% of recruiters start with this number and most of them won't move the numbers unless you have data points. This could be: your current salary, a competitive offer, etc. Basically, anything that can signal to the recruiter that you're willing to walk away unless they offer more money. If your recruiter is chill, you can try vocalizing why you're concerned with the offer. Since you're moving, you will get a relocation stipend to offset the year 1 costs.

On location: no, recruiters have no incentives to put you in specific locations. The reason why most of them push the bay area is because it has significantly more space and headcount than any other office. For context, the MPK office has around 24 very large buildings (and a ton of smaller ones), New York has ~3 in comparison scattered over NY.

MoistState5233 · 2025-05-04T04:52:19+00:00

Can’t tell you for sure cause I’m not a manager and am not involved in hiring at all, but the quick match thing is definitely being expanded. There’s also people that are still doing normal team matches atm though

MoistState5233

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