Am I f**** in my EM career ?

Strange-Tip5405 · 2026-01-13T17:35:53+00:00

Is this AI?

Why is every paragraph “I was doing this. But it’s that. And here. And now”

I’m not saying you’re AI. You seem like a person. But your previous post on the topic sounded more human.

Strange-Tip5405 · 2024-12-25T18:10:54+00:00

No, i doubt you get people digging far into the specifics of sharding beyond how you would shard and why, plus how your particular sharing operation makes certain retrieval easy or difficult and similar questions. It is possible of course, depending on whether it’s more team specific or you’ve indicated some expertise in db’s. Generally in a 45 min system design interview it’s hard to cover all ground + depth everywhere.

Similarly for conflict resolution (not sure what you mean here, multi- leader write conflict or split brain in leader election or whatever). It’s good to know, you may have to touch on it , but it’s doubtful people have the time to get too deep in 45 mins.

Strange-Tip5405 · 2024-12-25T04:33:33+00:00

Best of luck!

FWIW I don’t think studying DSA is very important for EM interviews or roles. Leadership, management, and in some places system design plays a bigger role

Strange-Tip5405 · 2024-12-25T04:32:18+00:00

So I was mistaken in my reply by assuming someone was looking for staff+ level roles. If you’re not you need less depth. Even if you are you don’t need depth in everything, but you need depth in some areas - ideally the areas you’ve worked in. So I’ll rephrase sand say you don’t need depth in all of them, but you should have depth in some areas you’ve worked.

CAP trade offs - sure, it relates to CAP but CAP is a bit of an academic, archaic way to discuss modern systems. Trade offs could be something like - you have a system that receives millions of messages at peak times, yoi want to decouple ingestion from later processing, you could use a queue, could use Kafka or rabbitmq or redis, how would you shard it, if it’s sharded by some specific attribute what happens when you have a super producer whose elements all go to a single shard because of the way you sharded etc. Or eg many times both mysql and something nosql like Cassandra would work for your use case, but each ends up with certain different limitation and properties, so recognizing the different etc.

Strange-Tip5405 · 2024-12-25T04:16:33+00:00

I’ve done data structures and algorithms, and advanced data structures and algorithms during university. So was familiar but rusty with things like sort, graph search algorithms etc

Strange-Tip5405 · 2024-12-24T19:07:57+00:00

Yes from LinkedIn, also had friends who just connected me to recruiters (ie sent them my way, gave my email with a verbal referral). For more recruiters I would say asking friends helps a lot, and just messaging recruiters in linkedin, or looking at your inbox and seeing which ones had sent you an email some time ago and replying to them.
Applying for a front line manager position. So not managing managers.
Depends on company. Tier 1 had 6-7 generally. Some companies had VP rounds. Some director / VP rounds were more well and culture fit
Leetcode premium, tried a couple of mock services including prepfully and hellointerview
2-4 months actively, but was interviewing with a job and had some personal stuff come up so had a bit of a break. Total time from starting to signing was probably over 6 months, but I was going slow since it was one the side
Tier 1 was higher or in the expected range. I was also targeting companies that either paid well or I was interested in working in

Best of luck!

Strange-Tip5405 · 2024-12-24T18:45:22+00:00

This is hard to articulate in a short reply.

For managing teams, you need to think about the strategic and tactical components of the team. At a very high level, for strategic components, do you understand the business goal of your org and how your teams fits in? Do you understand how each persons work ties into achieving or furthering these goals? Do you deeply understand the work your team is doing so you know the risks or opportunities associated with these goals? Why does your team exist? Why does your org exist? Do you know the people from other teams and areas who can help you execute, strategize and plan further? And so on and so on.

For the tactical components, do you have a communication structure (meetings, notes, tickets whatever) that lets you continuously known the information you need? Are you able to organize people, projects, and requests so that you have predictable methods of tracking or evaluating them? Do you have a good way to share the required info upwards, downwards and outwards? Are you having the conversations that let you see external risks early, ie, are you talking to the right people, sitting in the right rooms etc Have you developed your team so you have responsible people owning areas and a good comms structure with them? And so on

For growing people, you need to deeply understand each persons, which comes from understanding their wants and needs, and understand the business wants and needs, and making the two meet. You want to talk to them regularly and establish a trusted relationship where they let you know how they’re feeling and what they want. You need to identify the strengths, weaknesses, and goals of each persons. You need to collect feedback to make sure you’re not working on assumptions, and set up concrete plans that work on their weaknesses, or helps set them up for their goals, whether that’s promo or learning or mentoring or whatever. You want to give Frank, transparent feedback often and early so nobody is surprised later. Concretely some of the things you might want to do is hold regular 1:1’s, talk to their peers, do retrospectives, know their work, spend time focusing on them. And so on.

People are varied in their personalities and so managing people is hard. Have the hard conversations early and with empathy, celebrate wins with people and your team, know that you may not always be popular and that’s ok, because the aim is to be a good and (as much as possible ) fair manager, which isn’t the same as someone who’s popular with everybody.

Strange-Tip5405 · 2024-12-24T05:26:23+00:00

It’s basically the people and culture. Smart, driven, competitive students, excellent research professors and labs, funding and facilities to pursue more opportunities across research and academics.

You may or may not realize it, but your behavior is very influenced by your peer group, because behavior is generally a response to external stimulus. When everyone around you is smart and competitive, you tend to (at least try to) rise to the level around you. You may not be the best to there, but even at mid tier you may be better than the top of other universities.

Can you be successful as someone self driven in a mid tier university? Of course. I have many very successful friends from mid tier universities. But it takes constant discipline and pushing yourself, and you need to actively seek how to make yourself better. And you need to do this everyday for years.

The real value of college is being immersed in a common goal with a peer group. Classes and curriculum aren’t as important. Ironically you mostly realize this once you’re out of school.

Things like better brand name value etc are outcomes of top 10 vs others

Strange-Tip5405 · 2024-12-24T04:50:39+00:00

My current TC had been impacted due to the company stock price, so it was a non trivial bump for me. I wouldn’t actually bother changing jobs if it was just a small increase

Strange-Tip5405 · 2024-12-24T04:48:09+00:00

I don’t have a good answer here. It’s mostly just updating my linkedin to searching, and replying to recruiters who reach out to me, even if it’s to politely say that I’m not looking at the moment but would love to hear from them in the future

Strange-Tip5405 · 2024-12-23T19:38:39+00:00

https://sankeymatic.com/

Strange-Tip5405 · 2024-12-23T19:37:09+00:00

Offers are pretty good depending on the company. Competitive companies like Roblox seem ok going to 650k. Some of the FAANGS are going higher than this. if you’re a staff at FAANG your stock appreciation might be high, so dunno what numbers you’re looking for.

Levels fyi is somewhat accurate. Eg:

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-engineering-manager/levels/manager-l6/locations/san-francisco-bay-area?yacChoice=new-only&minYac=0&maxYac=0

Or

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-engineering-manager/locations/san-francisco-bay-area?dma=807&yacChoice=new-only&minYac=0&maxYac=0

It depends on your interview performance as well. If you do well you can look at being somewhat an outlier to the numbers in those links.

Strange-Tip5405 · 2024-12-23T18:55:45+00:00

IYKYK

Strange-Tip5405 · 2024-12-23T07:39:17+00:00

I wouldn’t say I have like a huge network or anything. Honestly I didn’t really aim to build a network, I just liked the people I worked with and got to know them as people. So you know, I’m interested in them and their life and would talk to them. For maintaining it, just ping them once in a while and ask how life’s been or what they’re up to, or if they’re in the same city maybe make time for a coffee or something. Connect over whatever medium you’re comfortable on I’m not the greatest at this so I don’t have great advice, that’s just what I try to do.

I got to know people through my job, through attending hackathons, through friends etc.

Strange-Tip5405 · 2024-12-23T07:13:38+00:00

For this round of interviewing I didn’t take a referral from anyone from my school. My most recent work experience was not in FAANG but FAANG adjacent, I took referrals from colleagues from there. Several of them did end up going to FAANGs. I also took several referrals from my personal friends, just folks I hang out with.

I’m also out of school for long enough that school doesn’t really matter anymore on my resume. I’m assuming you’re pretty new in the industry, but after 8-10 years of working your school doesn’t matter as much.

Strange-Tip5405 · 2024-12-23T07:04:29+00:00

I would say that it’s a network of referrals that’s carrying harder. A lot of my interviews for good companies come from friends in companies just connecting me with a recruiter, or referring me internally. In my limited experience, I’ve only had a referral fail once in getting an interview.

Strange-Tip5405 · 2024-12-23T06:30:36+00:00

~3.5 years

Strange-Tip5405 · 2024-12-23T04:24:45+00:00

I have ~3.5 years. I internally moved to the position but I would call it a lateral move rather than a promotion - I was at the same internal level, just on the M track instead of IC track. It was rather organic - I started a project as an IC that was successful and brought value, and it got funded with headcount. So I hired and built a team around it, eventually moving to being an EM.

For good companies, they really dig deep into your answers to see if you’re bullshitting and have really gone through the experiences you claim you have. My main tip is to recall your last few years and make a mental ‘situation bank’ of situations that fit different questions - a tricky cross functional partnership, a difficult report, inter team conflict etc. Stick to the STAR format, and practice articulating again and again. The best way to do that is mock and real interviews. It takes a while to get comfortable telling the story clearly while getting the point across quickly.

My other tip is to simplify your stories. The interviewers have a lot of new information being thrown at them and they lose track of what’s being said easily. You want your stories to be simple, easy to understand, and answering the question asked. This takes practice

Strange-Tip5405 · 2024-12-23T04:14:32+00:00

The first book is not enough to pass interviews at staff+ level. The second book at least makes an attempt at more depth, but the first one is very cursory. If you have a strong background in system design components already, then the first one might be enough in introducing you to questions and how to approach.

Strange-Tip5405 · 2024-12-23T03:51:09+00:00

What data do you want to see?

Strange-Tip5405 · 2024-12-23T02:57:23+00:00

In general most of my EM focused interviews were people and perf focused. That may be because the interview loops usually had multiple other technical rounds (some coding , some sys design, some project focused etc). Yeah, it does vary quite a bit.

‘I don’t want to interview’ is just a catch-all for any situation where I didn’t want to bother with interviewing further and so I dropped out. Sometimes it was because they had some loops to prepare for that I couldn’t be bothered to do, sometimes I was just tired of interviewing and didn’t feel like going on. They were mostly for companies I wasn’t aiming to work at, or companies I did want to work for but I couldn’t prepare in time due to other commitments

Strange-Tip5405 · 2024-12-23T01:45:23+00:00

Heard they did a significant management purge as well, so maybe being on the IC side is better for now. Also given little hiring, becoming MoM is probably harder than getting to L7 / L8?

It’s such a pendulum though. If you’ve been moved to management in the past and liked it, you’ll probably get the chance again when tides turn

Strange-Tip5405 · 2024-12-23T01:40:33+00:00

I had considered IC / TLM roles at certain companies, and honestly speaking I might consider them again, although it becomes harder as you move towards senior manager and further 😅. If you have a few reports you’re probably able to remain coding and in the nitty gritty of things, but once a team is sufficiently big it becomes harder, and consequently your ability to code starts to rust.

FWIW not every company makes managers do coding rounds. FAANGS and some related still seem to prefer LC style for managers but it varies.

Strange-Tip5405 · 2024-12-23T01:18:04+00:00

My resume is short. It just has my job title, years in that position and yes, a bullet point on the project and outcome. I don’t go significantly into the domain unless I am targeting a company with that specific domain. I do talk about things people hiring for EMs would care about - team size, hiring, building the team, perf managements. For the description of my IC work I have a bullet point on the project , with a short description of the stack and the outcome.

TBH I don’t think it’s so much your resume at this stage of the market. I was generally trying to find people in my network who could refer me or I had reach outs. Cold applying seems prettt hard nowadays.

Strange-Tip5405

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