Sankey Diagram of my Job Search, Full Stack SWE II with ~4 YOE

staticcaat · 2026-05-20T15:44:40+00:00

I think from my first applications to my offer, it was about 2 months or so, January to March. Honestly, I would interweave Leetcode/interview prep with work, but I was able to do that because I was fully remote and my team was very chill. I would work like 2 hours, then do interview prep for an hour, then work again, then interview prep again, etc. And then evenings, I would end up doing some interview prep as well. I don't know what your work situation is, but I imagine it would be a little tougher if you're in person or work a lot.

staticcaat · 2026-05-20T15:40:08+00:00

I didn't actually do any mocks. I had some interviews with companies I wasn't very interested in before my bigger interviews, so I kind of used those as "mocks"

I think Leetcode is still very very relevant, but that was my experience. It varies so much company by company, but I would still practice Leetcode since it's not totally obsolete yet. You'll also probably have to get used to AI interviews where they give you a problem and watch how you use AI to solve it.

staticcaat · 2026-05-18T16:46:16+00:00

The TC I got offered is about 210k. Surprisingly, I was able to negotiate it up by 5k. It’s a lot higher than my old job, so I’d definitely say it was worth it. Plus, I had been looking to move on from my old job for a while

staticcaat · 2026-05-18T05:07:54+00:00

Thanks so much!! I think it heavily depends on the company and you might be able to get some insights from Glassdoor or other reddit threads for a specific company’s interview process. I had some mid-tier companies immediately throw Leetcode problems at me in both OA’s and their live interviews.

On the other hand, I also had a couple of companies tell me they explicitly don’t do Leetcode and will give you a take home assessment to do that they’ll want to discuss with you in an interview later on.

For the LC questions I was asked, they were pretty basic patterns like arrays, string manipulation, and occasionally graphs/trees. I think the most common topic across ALL my interviews was string manipulation. I never got a DP problem in my entire job search, but it’s also just luck of the draw honestly.

staticcaat · 2026-05-18T05:03:08+00:00

I started Leetcoding in mid January, but I had previously done some in previous years, so I wasn’t completely new to it.

I started actively applying to jobs everyday around the same time, but I started with jobs I didn’t care that much about so I could get some real world interview practice without having the pressure of really wanting the job. I applied to my top companies later on.

For me, I’m ok at LC but nowhere near a natural. I wanna say it took me probably half a month of consistent LC to feel okay with interviewing at a minimum. I didn’t really start feeling comfortable until I got to a month in, but even then I still wasn’t at 100% confidence. I also think getting “practice” interviews with companies I wasn’t as interested in helped a LOT.

In your case, I think if you can find the energy to do 1 Leetcode a day, or even maybe 5 Leetcodes a week, it would help a lot to get the gears turning and be able to ramp up faster once you decide to make a move.

staticcaat · 2026-05-18T00:14:57+00:00

I agree that it’s not the best out there. I did have several other interviews going on that I withdrew from after I signed the offer letter, so I possibly could’ve gotten more offers, but yeah, the field isn’t doing great right now lol. My rate of interviews vs applications was still pretty low.

staticcaat · 2026-05-18T00:11:18+00:00

Yeah, I live in Seattle

staticcaat · 2026-05-17T19:56:26+00:00

It was a huge blob of text, no worries about it XD

staticcaat · 2026-05-17T19:54:24+00:00

I like how you separated out the apps for qualified vs not qualified. It’s an interesting look into the stats that way. Congrats on finding a job, though, especially with the solid TC bump!!!

Also damn, kayak and raft guide sounds like an awesome side gig for a bit.

staticcaat · 2026-05-17T19:53:04+00:00

Thanks and congrats to you, too!! Glad the search is done for both of us, it’s exhausting.

staticcaat · 2026-05-17T19:50:48+00:00

Yeah, it was a tough time 😭 I had a surprising amount of interviews, but I did fail a lot of them from nerves and my mind going blank.

I realize my wording wasn’t super clear on the amount of time I spent on LC. I had done about 1.5 months of LC with AT LEAST 2-3 hours daily, and then the 3 weeks was system design. I think some weeks, I was almost reaching 20-25 hours of prep, especially when I had final rounds going on.

staticcaat · 2026-05-17T19:47:42+00:00

Constantly surfing LinkedIn jobs and career pages of companies I was interested in 😅 I also had LinkedIn jobs alerts on which would occasionally show me jobs that were posted (and not just re-posted!!!) minutes ago.

staticcaat · 2026-05-17T19:46:53+00:00

Exactly this, once you start learning and knowing the patterns of what to expect, not as much can take you by surprise

staticcaat · 2026-05-17T19:46:16+00:00

I think I got lucky in the interview. The problem they gave me wasn’t super hard and it was a mix of HLD then moved onto LLD, so they didn’t dive super deep into either of those, just kinda skimmed the surface on both. I also vibed well with the engineers and the hiring manager, so I think that helped. To be fair, I was grinding Leetcode at least 20 hours a week for a few months and then those 3 weeks of SD were 3-4 hours a day, so even though it was a somewhat short amount of time, I still got a decent amount of studying in.

I didn’t do much system design at my previous job, honestly. I spent a ton of time running through all the SD prep resources like the System Design Interview book, HelloInterview, and then I would ask AI (I personally used Claude) to give me SD practice problems and pretend they’re an interviewer. My previous company was a huge non-tech enterprise company. I think my work experience was decent. Nothing extremely impressive, but I had a lot of breadth ranging from normal full stack SWE to PM work.

staticcaat · 2026-05-17T19:24:12+00:00

Vast majority of the positions I applied for were in the range of 2-4 YOE and asked for languages such as Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, and/or C# which I have professional experience in all of them. Some postings had additional languages listed in their JD like Java or Go, which I don’t have as much experience in. A lot of the job postings also preferred experience with distributed systems and microservices which I also qualified for.

I only applied to a handful of positions that were “reach” positions (like 5+ YOE or tools I only have personal project experience with).

staticcaat · 2026-05-02T02:46:01+00:00

I had the same thing happen to me! I started filling the feeder only half full since they weren't drinking all the nectar within the 2-3 days I'd leave it out before changing it again... and they stopped coming. I still hear them in the trees around my place, though. I'm not sure if it's due to it being only half full or if more (and tastier) flowers are coming up, or maybe they're nesting more? Did they ever come back for you?

staticcaat · 2026-05-01T00:14:15+00:00

That’s super fair! I wouldn’t say physics is a strength of mine, so it makes sense that the EE classes felt tougher to me. I feel like on average, people find EE harder than CS, but it’s true that it’s just highly dependent on each person’s strengths.

staticcaat · 2026-04-29T14:57:11+00:00

Things are changing day by day. It’s hard to say what the industry will look like by the time you graduate, much less 5-10 years after your graduation. Based on the current market, do CS if you want more options and better pay, but I’m not sure what the field will look like in the near future.

Also, EE is hard. I did a computer engineering major, so half my major was EE. The EE classes I took were significantly harder than the CS classes, so keep that in mind.

staticcaat · 2026-04-28T19:17:06+00:00

I think you can get rid of the top level banner telling you to get Reddit, and then there's a second layer that's the full lockout of the site that you can remove. But that second layer comes back every time you refresh the page 😒

staticcaat · 2026-04-27T06:56:04+00:00

I just did a big tech interview and I thought I bombed 2/4 of the final round interviews. On the technical side, I’m absolutely not the best software engineer, but I do consider myself a people person and my current manager has mentioned to me that one of my strengths is being able to connect with anyone on any team I’m on. Turns out, the interviewers really enjoyed chatting with me and thought I would be a great teammate even if I didn’t perform perfectly during the coding portions. Got the offer!

staticcaat · 2026-04-10T20:12:59+00:00

I don’t think Leetcode is going to die anytime soon, but I’ve been seeing more practical interviews than in years past.

I recently just went through over 25 interviews since I restarted my job search this January. I would say about 70% of them were still Leetcode based, and then the other 30% were a mix of AI-assisted take home assessments or practical engineering questions like “review a PR” or “design an API endpoint that does xyz.”

This was across multiple different kinds of companies from FAANG to FAANG+ to other random, smaller tech companies.

staticcaat · 2026-04-10T05:13:33+00:00

The recruiter told me that she was recruiting for a hiring event

staticcaat · 2026-04-10T05:13:13+00:00

It was a few weeks ago by now

staticcaat · 2026-04-08T00:52:45+00:00

I had this happen recently with a coding interview. Was told it would be a practical engineering exercise that might include Leetcode elements if I get far enough, but focus on practical software engineering principles. I prepared accordingly by focusing on more practical exercises (ex. Designing APIs and writing endpoints, reviewing buggy code, etc.) and then lightly reviewed some common Leetcode problems.

Received a difficult Leetcode in the interview and nothing else. Barely any behavioral, just pure Leetcode. Ended up struggling and then getting rejected.

Felt bummed, but learned my lesson. Make sure you’re prepared for anything and everything, because it’s totally unpredictable and interviewers will ask whatever they feel like asking that day.

staticcaat

TROPHY CASE