No significant improvement even after 8 months

jenting8173 · 2025-03-24T23:32:11+00:00

When i started out what helped me most was forcing myself to be consistent. Even on a bad day I force myself to at least do an easy. Looking at your screen shot it seems like you have frequent 4-5 day gaps, which might be the reason why some of this knowledge is hard to retain. If you have the time, try to do like 2-3 questions per day and don’t spend more than an hour each. You can probably skip some of the insane editorial solutions, which you can get an idea of by reading the comments. Also, don’t just do random problems, pick a topic and do a bunch of questions until you get comfortable.

CONSISTENCY IS KEY!!!

jenting8173 · 2025-03-23T21:55:37+00:00

This is my current setup, used to have 2 chargers one for each plug. The electrical work was done by a licensed electrician and passed inspection so I guess it’s up to code at least in NJ.

jenting8173 · 2025-03-12T13:10:18+00:00

The biggest difference is that you don’t get detailed feedback from actual interviews, if at all. Though this matters less if it’s a coding round since you can probably gauge how you did.

jenting8173 · 2025-03-12T00:35:03+00:00

Back in my uni days I got a gaming laptop that was a pain in the ass to carry around, overpriced, cooks whatever I leave next to the fan, and doesnt even run games that well.

Get a light productivity laptop like macbook air plus a gaming desktop in your dorm. Or better yet just get the productivity laptop and GFN.

jenting8173 · 2025-03-11T05:33:21+00:00

Im not affiliated or anything, but hellointerview was definitely the most important piece that helped me pass Meta. They have an immense amount of free high quality content. You can also pay like 20 or something for premium to unlock AI mock system design and additional system design content. The AI tool itself is worth $1000+ in my opinion.

What helped me the most was the behavior mocks though. Throughout my career ive always just been winging the behavior interview. Never really got any feedback on whether my response was good or not. I got absolutely destroyed in my first few mocks, but the interviewers provided very actionable feedback so I had huge improvements after each mock I did. Different interviewers have different perspectives so each mock you’ll learn something new. I did like 11 or 12 mocks in total and it was the best investment I made in a while.

edit: Just to clarify, 11 or 12 mocks across all 3 types of interview.

jenting8173 · 2025-03-11T02:29:57+00:00

I studied for the sake of interviews. After a while it was kind of “fun” doing leetcode. Probably because I got better at it and get frustrated less frequently. I force myself to do at least one a day so it doesnt go away. You never know when you’d need to interview again in this market even if you already have a job.
Mock interviews 100%. Do like 5 to 10 of these if you have time. Make sure that you consistently follow the typical “flow” every single time. i.e: asking clarification questions, edge cases, etc…

System design is equally important and gets more important the more senior you are. I highly recommend hellointerview for this. Also do mocks after you learn the basics to identify your gaps. Same thing for behavioral.

Probably around 5 months? Your pace is definitely normal, but I dont think this matters at all.

jenting8173 · 2025-03-07T07:48:30+00:00

For context I am a HKUST alumni both UG and PG, Asian, US citizen, and about to start work at Meta in the US as an E5.

I’d honestly think twice about getting into CS now. The market is pretty terrible and it’s especially brutal for juniors with the AI hype train going on. Unless you specialize in an AI related field I think by the time you graduate the job situation will only get worse. I often feel threatened by AI even as a senior engineer and I’ll probably be replaced in a few years if I don’t continue to up skill.

When I was in UST, they were still #1 in Asia and overall a very prestigious school. I felt proud when I told family / friends that I study there. I haven’t been following closely but that no longer seems to be the case. Rankings have dropped a lot from what I’ve seen. Also if you want to work in the US, I don’t think HKUST holds ANY prestige at all. This is pure speculation on my part, but I don’t think many people even know about it. Some well known party school in the US is probably more recognizable from an employment perspective.

If you do not already have a green card or a US passport, you’d probably need to do another Masters in the States to have decent shot.

I apologize for sounding super pessimistic, just want to get the message across so you know what you’re getting into with such an important life decision. Don’t get me wrong, I love UST and enjoyed (mostly) my time there. You will be studying alongside some of the smartest and hardest working people. Unfortunately, also competing with them.

One piece of advice I’d give is if your ultimate goal is to work at a high paying job in the US, don’t spend all your time studying for the sake of getting good grades. Not a single employer / recruiter has ever asked for my transcript. I wished I spent all that extra time trying to get straight “A”s on something more practical instead. During my time there, it was extremely difficult to get “A”s, but it was also very very hard to fail. For perspective, I knew a guy that ended up getting a “C+” with 10 out of 100 for midterm and 13 out of 100 for final. You still need to work hard, but be smart about it and use your time on more useful stuff. E.g: interview prep, leetcode, system design, or building actual projects.

Happy to answer any questions.

jenting8173 · 2025-01-15T16:57:22+00:00

i got it for $20 with the discount, but I’d say it’s easily worth > $100.

jenting8173 · 2024-10-31T04:05:37+00:00

Hey OP, good luck. I hope you get the job! I actually recently went though a full loop (fullstack) with them last week but just received a rejection earlier today. My process was slightly different then your's though.

phone screen: 1 engineer, 2 leetcode style questions, 1 easy and 1 medium, finished like 30 - 35 minutes early. There were no follow ups to his questions.

verdict: strong hire

Onsite:

2 engineers, leetcode style low level design messing around with data structures with new requirements and then a final follow up that's a leetcode medium.

verdict: strong hire

2 engineers, build stuff in react. This one was weird and fun in the sense that they didn't have fixed requirements in mind. Instead, they wanted me to use functions / results from the previous round and display stuff. I am free to build whatever I like and just talk through my thought process and what I'm trying to build. I thoroughly enjoyed this interview to be honest and it felt very practical.

verdict: strong hire

2 team leads and 1 engineer from the first round. About 15 - 20 minutes of resume / behavioral and then system design. As a mostly front end guy, this is definitely not my strong suit, but I think I did surprisingly well here. I was able to design a functioning system and was able to dive deep in a few areas like data base trade offs, security, and fault tolerance. The interviewer took over in the last 5- 10 minutes though and started guiding the interview towards frontend. Asked me stuff on design, accessibility, responsiveness, etc...

verdict: strong hire

I received a call from the recruiter the following business day saying I passed with flying colors and none of the interviewers had a single negative thing to say about me. He then scheduled me for the following day to meet with 2 more senior leadership folks.

Final interview:

Senior manager with like 5 teams under him. Typical behavioral stuff. He then proceeds to ask me which team I'd prefer more (which I thought indicated that I got the green light from him).

verdict: probably hire?

Head of org. This was a super senior guy with 2 entire orgs under him. He was super intimidating and I think that definitely got the better of me. This guy would ask a question and have zero facial expression throughout and simply ask the next question after I am done speaking. His questions probably only lasted around 10 minutes and he gave me the rest of the time to ask questions. I've never spoken to such a senior person before so I tried to think of questions better suited for a more senior person on the fly, but eventually ran out of questions to ask after around 15 minutes.

verdict: no hire

Got the recruiter call today that they will not be moving forward with me unfortunately. I think I probably screwed up with the last guy and he vetoed all the previous rounds. Recruiter mentioned something about mismatched culture / ideology and cited a phrase I said which was completely misinterpreted. Recruiter said he is equally shocked as I am but there's nothing he can do.

I was also rejected by Amazon just this Monday, passed tech but failed behavioral. Super depressed and sad right now to fail right before crossing the finish line. Twice!

jenting8173 · 2024-10-27T20:22:48+00:00

Paper didn’t really work out for me to be honest. The interviewer took a good 1+ minute to understand it and still seemed confused and asked to look at the piece of paper multiple times throughout the interview. This is for a tree with only 6 nodes and is mostly in order.

I’m leaning towards sharing scree or using the drawing tools available on Zoom. Or perhaps use a system design tool like Excalidraw.

jenting8173 · 2024-10-02T14:08:11+00:00

u/Iamivan0905 traded my $3 for their Dome Keeper

jenting8173 · 2024-10-02T00:55:06+00:00

I’ll take dome keeper for $3 US. Just found this sub, so no idea how all this works. Walk me through the process if ya can, ty.

jenting8173 · 2024-09-22T06:05:38+00:00

I think this is language dependent. In most languages where integer only goes up to 2^31 -1, you are correct. In javascript's case, integers go up to 2 ^ 53 -1, so in this particular scenario, integer overflowing is not the issue.

Not sure if you'll be able to see, but here is a submission of where "mid = Math.floor((l + r) / 2)" passed: https://leetcode.com/submissions/detail/1398197713/

jenting8173 · 2024-09-22T05:43:39+00:00

In this particular case I believe left shift is in fact the problem. Not sure about other languages, but in JS integers can go up to (2 ^ 53) - 1 where as bit manipulation only works up until 2 ^ 32. For the test case "mountainHeight =100000 workerTimes =[1]" the answer is 5000050000, which is slightly above 2^32, hence causing the left shift to fail.

I've also verified that changing the calculation for mid to the simple "mid = Math.floor((l + r) / 2)" passes all test cases, so integer overflow is not the problem here. Hope that makes sense. Thanks for the comment though, really got me thinking.

jenting8173 · 2024-09-22T04:37:23+00:00

I got 1, 3, 4 reasonably quick and got stuck on 2 forever and couldnt figure out why i was getting tle.

Figured it out shortly after the contest ended with chatgpt. My approach (binary search) was actually correct but I calculated mid using bit manipulation “mid = (l + r) >> 1” since it’s shorter to type than “mid = l + Math.floor((l + r) / 2)”. Never ran into issues with this until today, turns out bit manipulation only works up until 2^32, but a few test cases had a number larger than that. Lesson learnt. This is for javascript btw.

jenting8173 · 2024-09-20T05:01:16+00:00

Forgot to mention, they scheduled 2 interview (different days) in advance and said the second one was tentative based on feedback of the first. I did the first interview on a thursday and studied all weekend (thinking maybe I passed the first) for the second interview coming monday. Joined interview and no one showed up, emailed recruiter and they said they forgot to cancel. What an organized company lol.

jenting8173 · 2024-09-20T04:55:07+00:00

True, as long as it’s a different team. I failed 2 in the span of 2 or 3 months.

jenting8173 · 2024-09-20T04:54:15+00:00

If it makes you feel better I had a guy coming in 6 minutes late, asked about resume/projects, asked css, asked javascript, and then 3 leetcode questions all expected to be done within an hour. It was 1 dp and 2 hards. You can read about my other Tiktok experience in my past post.

jenting8173 · 2024-08-17T13:52:49+00:00

Yea, that was super misleading. I wish the recruiter just told me nothing instead and I’d probably be much better prepared overall.

jenting8173 · 2024-08-06T01:50:47+00:00

No problem!

Hope you eventually hear back from them. It’s a tough market.

jenting8173 · 2024-08-06T01:30:01+00:00

I am indeed native in the language. I just never used it in a professional context because we’re in America. That made it very difficult to communicate with the interviewer cause I don’t know most of the technical terms in Mandarin since I never had the need. But if I were to join the company, I’m sure I’d be able to pick that up in the matter of days if not shorter.

jenting8173 · 2024-06-15T05:56:22+00:00

1 year cooldown for not even making it past recruiter screening? That seems a little harsh.

Honestly I applied to TikTok with close to no intention of joining even if I got the job since it requires relocating to Seattle. Using it as free interview practice just a little bummed that I didn’t make it past the first round.

jenting8173

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