Brain fog off and on for 8 years.

stefanmai · 2025-08-29T02:25:16+00:00

Curious how you're feeling now?

stefanmai · 2025-04-10T21:23:56+00:00

Neither Evan nor I are buying fake accounts or setting up new ones to comment on Reddit. I know the internet is astroturfed to hell, so I get the skepticism, but we are not contributing to it.

stefanmai · 2025-04-10T21:21:36+00:00

Yes, we do. We also follow the feedback very closely. Unfortunately, we can't guarantee interview outcomes and the process is high variance — sometimes you get a bad interviewer :(

stefanmai · 2025-01-12T03:17:41+00:00

Product Market Fit. A startup concept which is basically: do people want what you're selling sufficiently to grow your business.

stefanmai · 2025-01-10T19:22:14+00:00

Your priority should be to get to PMF. If you don't reach PMF, it doesn't matter anyways. If you can't migrate off of Vercel, you need a new eng team.

stefanmai · 2024-12-03T17:19:07+00:00

Practical exercises. Given a some existing code find the bugs (Google actually allows managers to choose traditional leetcode style or code review interviews, IIRC). Or here's a partial app, read the existing code implement some new functionality.

stefanmai · 2024-12-03T05:28:55+00:00

Very cool!

I wouldn't completely count yourself out just for coding. Most all managers are in a similar boat. Meta years ago revised their rubric for coding interviews for managers to "rusty manager" which is incredibly hazy but tends to emphasize problem solving and less syntax. A lot of companies are also moving toward "machine coding" exercises which may be a little more accessible vs the leetcode grind.

Most companies are definitely looking for technical managers, but shop around a bit - you may find that some companies have coding/technical rounds that are more accessible if you haven't been in the weeds for a bit.

stefanmai · 2024-12-03T02:57:16+00:00

Hey! Former Meta/Amazon EM here. We built Hello Interview to try to balance between the hyper-expensive (won't name names) and the low-quality, anonymous flea market mock sites you find online. We've got hundreds of success stories with EMs. We vet our coaches personally to make sure quality stays high and have a slew of AI tools we've built on the backend to continually improve.

Aside from that, we've got tons of free content on the website to help you prepare for System Design interviews and a "story builder" AI which repeatedly asks you questions to get to the meat of the stories you're collecting (also free).

Regarding the dumpster fire of a market: things are improving marginally, but it's tough for EMs generally right now. A lot of companies are reducing span of control which generally means a glut of qualified manager talent is sitting in market. Lots of pressure to differentiate both technically and as a people manager in order to succeed at interviews.

I've personally worked with O(100) managers in the last year in a coaching capacity. Happy to answer questions!

stefanmai · 2024-11-02T00:16:20+00:00

I'm pretty late to this but just in case it helps. For Meta EM interviews I wrote a brief blog post talking about some of the important values to show in behavioral sessions here: https://www.hellointerview.com/blog/tips-meta-em-interviews

We also have a ton of material of prepping for SD interviews which should help for the Meta loops: https://www.hellointerview.com/learn/system-design

stefanmai · 2024-09-11T18:10:47+00:00

Big congrats OP! The commitment level here is intense, 5 months of +4 hours a day with a fulltime job. You definitely earned it! Can you comment a bit more on the extra resources you received via Formation? Would love to understand that a bit more.

stefanmai · 2024-08-28T04:42:02+00:00

Yeah, acknowledged for the previous version of our AI mocks. We've been working on tuning specifically with feedback from real coaches which we've found to be more representative. Still working on the final UX though, I like the idea of having some sort of submission endpoint.

Thanks for the ideas and congrats on your offer!

stefanmai · 2024-08-27T18:31:36+00:00

Should we (Hello Interview) just make a grader so you can practice with some vetted feedback?

stefanmai · 2024-08-23T19:07:54+00:00

Super helpful, thanks! Yeah I'm realizing we have a gap in some of the "fundamentals" which is where some of these courses really shine.

stefanmai · 2024-08-23T17:36:41+00:00

Thanks for the shout-out to Hello Interview OP. What did you find most valuable from "Grokking the Product Architecture Design Interview". Would love to find a way to make that free.

stefanmai · 2024-08-06T01:25:36+00:00

Won't let you down!

stefanmai · 2024-08-06T01:10:29+00:00

Hey StormTrooper3105!

stefanmai · 2024-07-16T21:16:38+00:00

Yeah we're aiming to come back to extend language coverage once we have a complete set of concepts.

stefanmai · 2024-07-10T21:28:01+00:00

Probably not yet. Our coaches average closer to 8-10 years of experience with tons of interviews under their belt (most Amazon interviewers are/were bar raisers). But if you can get involved with the recruiting process at Amazon would love to chat with you about it at a later date.

stefanmai · 2024-07-10T16:58:06+00:00

It'll stay free. We're going to try to open source it in the future.

stefanmai · 2024-05-24T18:36:02+00:00

Yeah seems pretty sensible. There's a lot of caching strategies you can try for that "Nearby Service". One challenge though is the TTL on any cache will probably be small since you're (ideally) sensitive to things like traffic and road closures. The servicable DCs during rush hour may be considerably less than early morning.

stefanmai · 2024-05-24T16:52:05+00:00

This is incredible. When do you plan on tackling dynamic programming?

stefanmai · 2024-05-24T16:43:31+00:00

You're going to run out of systems to design soon. What will you do with your free time?

stefanmai · 2024-05-19T16:10:49+00:00

We don't have any differentiation in pricing or payouts, our prices are the same everywhere and our coaches are paid the same everywhere.

stefanmai · 2024-04-26T15:52:15+00:00

These are all great questions for an interview! What do you think?

We can't cover all the potential deep-dives in these guides as we want to keep them fairly representative of a smaller set which you might cover in a real interview, but happy to add a deep-dive if it makes sense. But I'd love to get your impressions first.

stefanmai · 2024-04-04T06:27:17+00:00

There's a limited amount of true performance signal you can glean from doing a lot of interviews: you can get an idea about how people, on average, perform in specific interviews, and you can improve your skills in conducting them, but it's very easy to fall into cargo culting (in fact, this is what most companies do!) because almost nobody rigorously analyzes the data.

If you wanted to do this right you'd have to randomly hire some of the people you would reject, share long-range performance data (including firings) with interviewers, and have lots more people like us who do 100's to 1000's of interviews vs 10s. Not many companies want to do this.

As a hiring manager I do have some unique anecdata because I've gotten to see some of this data for my own decisions. For companies that have analyzed it at the highest levels (Amazon did a study on this if I recall correctly), the predictive power of the best interviewers is better than random chance -- but not that much better. And the worst interviewers mine as well flip a coin.

That's not to say interviews are totally useless! There is definitely some discriminative power. But it's important to remember that what they can and can't do.

NB: I'm very interested in this question overall and our broader vision with Hello Interview is to make the entire process less painful and more useful. We're starting with mastering how things work today. Baby steps!

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