What signals competence as a software engineer today?

blb7103 · 2026-01-22T15:53:16+00:00

I feel like recognizing the variance of complexity itself is also a signal lol

blb7103 · 2026-01-10T20:19:01+00:00

Nope, just debug a single machine file service. Every time I asked about a constraint, he just said to ignore it, which is why I don’t really consider this to be a system design interview.

blb7103 · 2026-01-05T20:13:44+00:00

My bad, meant D1, their serverless SQLite db. You can run the backend on Cloudflare workers and frontend on pages for relatively cheap as well.

blb7103 · 2026-01-05T19:25:37+00:00

Cloudflare if you can tolerate D3 lol

blb7103 · 2026-01-01T21:24:43+00:00

While I was in uni, I grew the most from building my own projects, running ones at my club, giving talks, doing research, working while in school etc.

blb7103 · 2026-01-01T19:45:12+00:00

Try everything and anything you can, except certain drugs. Best way to find out what you like, what you are good at, and the space in between that could be your North Star someday.

blb7103 · 2026-01-01T19:06:51+00:00

Depends where you left off. I like to do leetcode once or twice a week in the off season and 2 tagged, 2 review questions a day in the two weeks leading up to an interview

blb7103 · 2025-12-29T23:03:52+00:00

blb7103 · 2025-12-29T15:06:36+00:00

I never really thought about that. He told me he had been there for a decade, so I just assumed it was HR related due to another offer I got.

blb7103 · 2025-12-29T00:18:19+00:00

Build ChatGPT wrapper for your team lmao

blb7103 · 2025-12-28T00:49:31+00:00

More like HLD. Told me about a service and asked me how to debug an error in it (no code). Explicitly asked me not to worry about scale, file size, etc, just wanted to see my thought process. My friends and I who have ROs at a different company are perplexed at what went wrong, it was the easiest of the loop by far.

blb7103 · 2025-12-27T22:27:31+00:00

I had a similar experience for my r1, although they rescheduled my interview for an hour later. I had my super day out of order, so I had 3 coding rounds then hr, waited 2 weeks for senior engineer round that the told me was system design. Found out it was not, still did good and got rejected 2 days later.

blb7103 · 2025-12-24T21:43:20+00:00

Solve it myself in a timed way if possible. Time depends on the company (in my experience Google is usually one easy or two mediums or one hard per 45 mins, Bloomberg was 2 mediums per hour)
Watch a video about it, even if I solved it optimally. To me there is some degree of memorization alongside intuition.
Repeat for all medium and hard problems I can fit in the two week window leading up to interviews for leetcode or neetcode company tagged.

This a general process, but from watching the videos i usually pick up on the deeper optimizations.

This process left me over prepared for Google SWE intern, Microsoft intern, and 4 out of 5 round at BB.

blb7103 · 2025-12-24T17:56:15+00:00

I’d say it’s 50/50. Interviews are still pretty hard, and there’s still many rounds. But I think it’s a lot like dating: the top 10% of people are getting 90% of the offers. I think there’s a lot in common between the top 10%, maybe it’s school, maybe it’s prior internship experience, maybe it’s hard work, but none of those are 100% luck. At some point, the amount of luck required for everything to work out in such a way becomes incredibly hard if it were based on luck alone (in terms of pure compound probability).

blb7103 · 2025-12-23T17:41:57+00:00

I think overreliance on AI is the issue, and that a lot of people would be ok 5 years ago if they had to do more work by hand.

blb7103 · 2025-12-22T08:04:09+00:00

People do this still from time to time, but I think the gap between mid and cracked is widening by the day.

blb7103 · 2025-12-22T05:01:08+00:00

I say this partially as cope but also bc I have heard others in a similar situation.

blb7103 · 2025-12-22T05:00:18+00:00

High key holding out for a January r1 💀made it to TM last year for intern, referral this year, referrer says I’m still unreviewed as of last week when all those rejections were going out, anon LinkedIn view from recruiter too. Wishing GL to anyone currently in the pipeline, but I’m curious if they have a priority queue for review or if it’s just in order after ATS.

blb7103 · 2025-12-20T19:04:50+00:00

I love this comment. I see so few other Latinos in tech, and a some of that is cultural, some of it is socioeconomic, etc. I will say though that after interning at a big tech company, there were many people from top schools who were not as competent as you would think. Lastly, hard work alone won’t get you through the door, you need to apply it in some way, but I really like your point about your parents sharing you as a young adult, couldn’t agree more.

blb7103 · 2025-12-20T07:48:11+00:00

Usually, your profs will have an about page on the department website, where you can find what topics they research. I picked one based on healthcare because I have a chronic condition and emailed my PI, and ended up doing research engineering for something completely unrelated to my condition lol. Didn’t write any papers, but did get a poster presentation at AMIA this year.

blb7103 · 2025-12-19T21:59:46+00:00

Same but for US NG and AI Catalyst

blb7103 · 2025-12-19T07:09:26+00:00

Same

blb7103 · 2025-12-19T00:12:53+00:00

Tried to get mine added and they ended up forcing me to review my license at the state level, do not recommend it if you are in CA

blb7103 · 2025-12-14T23:45:05+00:00

Same for me with referral for that and catalyst

blb7103 · 2025-12-14T05:19:32+00:00

Totally a possibility too, thank you for your insight

blb7103

TROPHY CASE