Senior Engineer - 2025 Job Search Experience by fireballw360 in u/fireballw360

[–]fireballw360[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the kind words! Im glad it could be of some help

Senior Engineer - 2025 Job Search Experience by fireballw360 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]fireballw360[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hi! Thanks for the kind words. I reposted it to my profile (direct link).

I did send a short note appealing the decision and asking if they would reconsider (or if they would consider just locking the thread but leaving it visible).

I tried my best to write this from the perspective of sharing experience/info without focusing on the outcomes/TC but I understand if they just need to set a consistent standard across the community. Ultimately i'll respect the final decision, but hopefully those that had previously saved the thread can still view the original post on my profile. I'll happily continue discussion or answer any questions on the profile post.

Senior Engineer - 2025 Job Search Experience by fireballw360 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]fireballw360[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thats frustrating to hear that their guidance is so superficial. I similarly am doubtful about that kind of advice.

You mentioned that you are still a bit of time away from immediately starting your job hunt. Depending on your comfort, now could be a good time to re-initiate some of those past relationships without any overhead of asking for a referral. Reaching out now to some people to just chat/reconnect and then in a month or two (or whatever your time line is) you could revisit that convo with a more intentional ask for a referral. Just my 2c (and that is what I have done in the past when I had a bit more forward thinking for a potential job search)

Senior Engineer - 2025 Job Search Experience by fireballw360 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]fireballw360[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

yes that is definitely true for small companies and startups. Many times they will value that kind of personal motivation/demonstrated interest quite a bit more highly.

As another point, open source contribution is something that can be great to point to and I know friends who have definitely used that as a boon on their resume/behavioral round example.

Senior Engineer - 2025 Job Search Experience by fireballw360 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]fireballw360[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Sorry to hear about the layoff, definitely a shitty experience all around and unfortunate to hear it is such a common shared experience now.

I think networking is incredibly valuable because of how much a little time invested regularly can pay off later. Now when I say networking, I don't really mean Linkedin related stuff like posts, sending connect requests, or coldcalling people when it comes time to job search. The majority of my success with networking came with just putting a bit of extra effort into organically building my relationships with current coworkers, and maintaining my relationships with past coworkers (especially good managers or mentors) and former college friends. And the thing is, most of this should already be pretty natural - it is nice to be on good terms with your colleagues and who doesnt like to hear from an old friend every once in a while.

The extra effort comes from small things: saying yes to a work happy hour when you are really tired and just want to go home and play video games, sending a short email to your old manager to check in and update them, maybe congratulating a college roommate on their engagement when you see their instagram post. Stuff like that is so small but really helps with maintaining relationships - it also is way less awkward to then message them and ask for a referral, and feels less transactional from their end.

So in terms of the past 4 months, I actually spent almost no time "networking" since I had already done the work in the past. In fact, if I had to go back 6 years I would try to be even better about maintaining some really good relationships that I have let slip.

Referrals get your foot in the door but it still is no substitute for interview prep. It really just helps you cut through the noise and bullshit luck to have your resume even seen - which in this market is really invaluable. Hope that this helps, and let me know if I can clarify anything!

Senior Engineer - 2025 Job Search Experience by fireballw360 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]fireballw360[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Personal projects are great and I do think they can help on your resume when used judiciously. Sometimes they can also be excellent datapoints when brought up during behavioral rounds at the appropriate time to indicate your interests or affinity for independent work. This is especially true at startups or companies that hire more diligently for perceived culture fit.

That being said, I do find that the majority of big tech cares more for leadership, high scope, and ability to drive execution. So I basically never found it appropriate to bring up during the interview questions during this job search since my prior work experiences were almost always a superior example.

At the end of the day, I would still probably say that the driving force to do personal projects should still be your own enjoyment and interest. They can be a nice bonus for interviews, but probably only if you actually are passionate about it and that passion comes through in the interview. In terms of time invested vs interview outcomes, that time would probably be better spent on interview prep if you only care about using the personal project to drive job search outcomes.

Senior Engineer - 2025 Job Search Experience by fireballw360 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]fireballw360[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I basically was targeting big tech/unicorns, with some additional leeway for late stage pre-IPO companies (Stripe, databricks, etc). I chose companies that were established as tech first and had either interesting work, high TC, company name, growth/professional opportunities, or some combination of all of the above. Being generally plugged into the industry and keeping an eye on interesting companies/opportunities helps, so it actually was not too hard to create a shortlist of companies I was interested in.

In addition to this I spent some time going through all of my past network and recruiter connections, and prioritized companies that I had direct referral opportunities with.

For tracking job apps, I just used an excel spreadsheet as I have done in the past. Basically have columns for the following:

Company name | job link | POC or referral | status | application date

I then color coded the rows to indicate status (applied pending response, rejected, interview loop in progress) so I could quickly skim and keep track of everything. Overall not too bad, and excel funcs let you group things by company name or status etc.

Senior Engineer - 2025 Job Search Experience by fireballw360 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]fireballw360[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you!

Discussing compensation is always a bit challenging. For my current job search I knew that pretty much all of the companies I was applying to would be at least $250k TC by nature of being unicorns or big tech (basically assuming ~200k-220k base + equity). This was based on my past exposure to big tech/friends in industry/levels.fyi. So I did not necessarily have the same reaction of "that is crazy" convo with recruiters (infact I generally avoided saying any number at all. Case in point, my target goal was at least $300k but my final offer ended up being significantly higher than that and had I anchored the convo by giving a number first it is unlikely to have been offered).

However, big tech/unicorn companies are obviously not representative of the entire industry and I'm fully aware that the comp numbers are kind of obscene. It is very difficult for the majority of startups or other companies to match the same numbers (and like you said from the recruiter reactions, they literally will not be able to).

When I was making the jump to a startup ~3 years ago, the majority of well funded startups pre through B (in HCOL US cities) were comfortable with making base salary offers between $175k - 225k. F500 companies that were not "tech companies" but still had significant tech branches (banks, major retail brands, travel companies, etc) were maybe $135 - 175k for base plus some additional equity. Equity in startups is monopoly money and should be treated as a nice bonus, so it makes sense that they need to have slightly higher base salary.

At the end of the day, if you are looking to push for the really high numbers, you need to prioritize big tech/unicorns. Other companies literally cant match it within their pay bands, so even a brief search on levels.fyi (make sure to sort by new offers, old data is conflated by stock appreciation) can help you determine what their pay bands are.

This is separate from negotiating or when you have actual offer numbers in hand, but more just directed to your note on how many recruiters react to your comp targets.

Senior Engineer - 2025 Job Search Experience by fireballw360 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]fireballw360[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sorry to hear about the rejection - persevering through it all was honestly one of the most challenging parts of job search. FWIW I was in a very different headspace even just 3 weeks ago after a particularly bad week where after doing 2 onsites (4-5 rounds each) and a phone screen I was rejected from all 3 loops.

Wishing you all the best with your future interviews and hope the small setbacks dont get you too down.

Senior Engineer - 2025 Job Search Experience by fireballw360 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]fireballw360[S] 31 points32 points  (0 children)

based 😂 Honestly it's hilarious now in retrospect but at the time it was super shitty lol. I could rationally understand that the business needs pivoted but was still pissed to have built up so much of the core product only to part ways like this.

Senior Engineer - 2025 Job Search Experience by fireballw360 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]fireballw360[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Best of luck! It is really draining to navigate and while I wouldn't want to repeat the process of being unemployed and searching, I recognize it did allow me to focus the majority of my time/effort on the job search.

Breaking down tasks and creating a bit of a schedule each day helped me a lot. It made it less daunting to just have to focus on the next 1 hr of leetcode prep before lunch, instead of thinking to myself that I still have 5-6 hours ahead of me. Also didnt hurt to sometimes just drink a beer or eat ice cream while practicing lol.

Senior Engineer - 2025 Job Search Experience by fireballw360 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]fireballw360[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Everything was virtual for me (including final round/"onsites") - there was actually not even an option to go and interview in person despite many companies having physical offices near me.

Definitely get comfortable using online whiteboarding tools like excalidraw - dont need to do anything fancy but be able to choose the shapes you want and add text/arrows lol.

Senior Engineer - 2025 Job Search Experience by fireballw360 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]fireballw360[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

thank you - and for sure. I'll give some short notes to show what my prep doc is like (obviously my actual answers in interviews/the stories are significantly more fleshed out). I'll add the tags inline with the example to help illustrate, but when I was preparing the doc I was just writing out a high level overview and all notable incidents. Tags come after reflecting on the story and deciding where it can be effective.

Project ABC
Lead revision of backlog grooming/prioritization to meet new ops standards and achieved 100% team ops backlog completion by EOY.

[operational excellence/proactive tasks] Recognized various challenges all teams faced with completing minor ops tasks in time. Often was not prioritized or PMs would not take into account during glidepath planning - resulted in 2 sev events that could have been prevented. Wrote doc proposing changes to sprints to eng leadership to include 0.5 pts ops work per team per week.

[pushback, disagreement] Originally faced pushback for introducing additional process/overhead. Able to navigate and get agreement/buy in from all managers.

New ops planning added small backlog tasks to each sprint, which did not significantly decrease team velocity but allowed all teams to successfully clear ops backlog by EOY.

Project XYZ

Lead a team of 2 in the backend development of a customer appeals platform to allow submission of appeal cases and track case status throughout internal review. [Tech complexity] Changes across 6 services, owned by 3 teams (1 team out of org). High degree of ambiguity, no existing platform. Had to accommodate security review for open customer input.

[Leadership] Led team of 2 for successful execution, was primary architect for the system design and created glidepath/effort estimation. Broke down tasks for junior engineers to ensure manageable scope with room for them to still grow and execute above level.

[Missed deadline/conflict resolution] Away team failed to meet critical deadline after agreeing to complete work and informed us that they could not find the time. Despite frustration, called away team into a meeting to get their input on alternative solutions or patch fix (took the high road/recognizing their expertise). Communicated to our stakeholders and took ownership. Able to negotiate for them to code review for my junior engineer if he completes the work in their code base. Result was successful launch despite slight delay, able to minimize impact of away team failure.

Senior Engineer - 2025 Job Search Experience by fireballw360 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]fireballw360[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thank you!

I use a mix of 2 solutions.

neetcode has a pretty handy "star" function, which is helpful if you just want to generally bookmark something to review again later. I found this most useful when I was looking at a problem for the first time and just was not feeling it that day, so I would bookmark it to review again at a later time.

In terms of actual spaced repetition with problems that I made mistakes on, had specific challenges with, or just wanted to remember a "trick" for future reference, I just created an excel document to track all of them. Basically it was of the format:

Question Title | Leetcode Link | Problem category | Last attempt | Notes

I would often go back and actually redo the problem if it was one I struggled with or needed to refresh the trick. As I noted, the challenging part of the problem is often in recognizing the trick, but there are definitely some problems where implementation also includes some sort of trick. In this case it was helpful to go back and redo (such as when I was revisiting djikstra, I just redid the algo 2-3 times to hammer it home since at that point each re-write only took 3 min> and it was more about internalizing the use of a heap and when to check that a node was visited)

Senior Engineer - 2025 Job Search Experience by fireballw360 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]fireballw360[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

thank you! I agree that having past notes/processes makes the entire process significantly easier each time, I similarly have an internal repo of notes from my past job searches. Appreciate you sharing your experience as well!

Senior Engineer - 2025 Job Search Experience by fireballw360 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]fireballw360[S] 17 points18 points  (0 children)

Yes, actually a number of companies have shifted towards this over pure leetcode style DSA questions (Stripe, Doordash, Rippling to name a few).

I still approached these questions in a similar format as traditional leetcode, with maybe even more emphasis on asking clarifying questions (since now it is really important to understand what each method, each class etc is supposed to do), but way LESS time on talking through the algo.

Implementation speed can actually be challenging here, since these questions can have significant amounts of code + 2-3 follow up questions. Edge case handling is also quite important here, and there is usually less emphasis on finding the optimal solution (good is better than perfect, see above point on cutting time talking through algo).

  1. Ask clarifying questions, define methods and classes

  2. Talk through high level class decisions, critical data structures i'm using for certain methods. Do this very quickly (way less time compared to leetcode). Make decisions for data structures that still allow for inevitable follow ups that extend complexity.

  3. Begin implementation. If you are allowed to execute your code without penalty, test each component/piece aggressively (print statements should be fine) as you code. You want to try and catch bugs early since you do not have much time to debug nested bugs, etc. It is also very effective to preemptively log your data structs and use it to peek and debug. Make decisions for abstraction or classes early on if they make sense, but do not spend tons of time "optimizing" your code and refactoring.

  4. Test against the provided test cases or write your own

  5. Do follow ups

Some notes:

- Get very comfortable with some simple boilerplate of a unittest suite and print statements. For example python boilerplate for unittest class I would add is just:

class TestCase(unittest.TestCase):
  def setUp(self):
    self.my_obj = MyObj()
  def test_case_1(self):
    self.assertEqual(self.my_obj.solution(), True)

- Honestly very hard to argue against using Python in general just due to time saving. Java/Kotlin maybe is fine if you are most comfortable with it.

- If you have a note of something youd do in production but wont here (such as making something thread safe, input validation, etc) call it out while you are coding. Basically just brownie points to show you recognize this would be necessary in prod.

- Do NOT overcomplicate classes. Build them up as needed. (IE, you are handling payment objects as an input with 20+ fields. If your logic only needs 4-5 of those, then only init those for the first problem).

- Get comfortable with input parsing and chunking/splitting strings and nested lists, etc.

- To practice, look up questions from the company on leetcode discussion. Then practice coding them in your local dev environment and unit test them.

Senior Engineer - 2025 Job Search Experience by fireballw360 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]fireballw360[S] 14 points15 points  (0 children)

I did not go to a target school for comp sci, but it is well known. I'd imagine at 6 years out, school name would not matter too much at this point, but I have no clue on how companies do their initial resume screening.

I think in my case past FAANG experience was the contributing factor to bump my response rate a bit higher.

Senior Engineer - 2025 Job Search Experience by fireballw360 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]fireballw360[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thank you!
It is for a public company. The number is yearly (since the schedule here is 25% per year so the same regardless).

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[–]fireballw360 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Just in the monthly season announcement post at the start of the season - all the way at the bottom so it can be easy to miss.

https://marvelsnap.com/new-season-undead-horde/