#Senior Eng Search

70 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

grim needle
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Man, I had so much bad luck with this search. Even interviews that I thought were guaranteed weren't considered. But got the first offer for senior, then another principal offer came 2 days later. Guess my bad luck is over. Would be nice to be called a principal engineer but the senior paid more than double.

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So yay new server role

royal knot
lofty fossil
grim needle
lofty fossil
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Did you regret doing that come interview time haha?

grim needle
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I think I need to slowly prep lc

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when it's more enjoyable doing 1-2 a day

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the one I got had like 2 lc interviews

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the other had none

lofty fossil
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LC takes time. There's just a ton of content.

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That's why they ask new grads. You literally can't marathon it the day before

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So it's a way to filter for grads who work consistently over time and don't just study for the job interview.

grim needle
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yeah for sure, wish there was a better way of finding mid+

lofty fossil
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Just gotta make it fun and regular like you said yeah. Maybe they want to filter for not burnt out candidates who want to write code is my guess.

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Train up for advent of code in December with Purple Puppy.

grim needle
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Looks like it's my turn to post a blog. I'm probably quitting without a job lined up in a week in order to take a 2-3 month sabbatical. Then I have the choice of boomeranging back to amazon as an L6 or going somewhere else as a senior or staff eng. So far, opening myself up on linkedin I've had probably 50+ companies reach out, but the technical interviews... yeah. 7.5 years of not being in school I've lost some of my DS&A knowledge.

lofty fossil
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Are you feeling like your approach is "get good at DSA," or "find an option that avoids it?"

grim needle
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I've been seeing a mix of companies that the answer is both. Some are only focusing on system design and experience. Others are doing more "realish" world programming examples. A few yeah the full 4-5 hour interviews with DS&A + system design + ...

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I need to get better at the latter

lofty fossil
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Then, do you want some advice from someone a decade younger on how to do DSA haha.

grim needle
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sure

lofty fossil
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I like this one just because it's a neat and organised list of questions that are all extremely useful. There are plenty of others ways to do it, and good textbooks.

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Ultimately you just gotta do it every day, engage in active recall, do stuff in multiple media and talk to people about it. Drawing pictures of algorithms is very, very important, Cornell notes etc.

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You feel like you suck for xxx amount of time, that's how it is.

Then you stop sucking after 2 weeks because you did it before. And that really, really counts when it comes for the human brain..

terse moat
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You know this guy is Sr Dev material from how he ghosted this two-way convo.😂

grim needle
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Especially since there's a ton of info that I need to read through 🙂

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But yeah I'm going to dive into it, I appreciate it @lofty fossil

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I'll probably have some followups

lofty fossil
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I assumed he was getting his beauty sleep, it's past his bed time haha.

grim needle
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I'm getting old, but I still have a midnight bedtime 😄

lofty fossil
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allg, that's not necessarily technical info tho so take what you need and works for you.

grim needle
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On a related note, I wish I studied 1 question a day (or even week)

lofty fossil
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All the fancy Google scholar stuff just says spaced repetition is everything. I've found its really, really true.

grim needle
lofty fossil
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Neetcode is very, very good.

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Almost unfortunately so given the name.

merry wagon
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If you ever want to do a round two of our mock but reversed lmk 😉

lofty fossil
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I think the other thing is you get a lot more out of it if you push your brain to 100%.

Hard to put into words, but I found the best way is 1 question per day (or more). But when I do that question the sweat is dripping off my forehead.

hidden adder
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Just how much LC should an L6 expect?

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I've already been surprised by how much LC might matter for an architect 😩 (because I shadowed such interview)

grim needle
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For some companies the same as an l4 + multiple system design

silver canopy
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can you boomerang back as l7?

oblique acorn
calm lotus
forest grail
grim needle
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Yes, you'd have to interview for the role you want. But boomerang is classified as anyone coming back (at any period) to the company.

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I wouldn't pass L7 right now

royal knot
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hey @grim needle , im going to do the same thing as you... ! taking a 3 months vacation atm...and then going for L5/L6 staff roles in meantime

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havent really started digging in but i def wanna chronical my efforts too

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thanks for doing that work...i should read through this post 🥺

royal knot
grim needle
low shore
stiff condor
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@grim needle hey just letting you know I'm aiming for mid-senior roles as well. Quitting without anything lined up and taking a 6 month break. Wishing you the very best. You're not alone 🙌

royal knot
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so glad theres a few of us in this boat!

silver canopy
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does the pay band for l6 exceed 600k in bay area nowadays?

grim needle
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So weird experience from a company today. I was turned down for a role, quoting that they thought I was more of an SRE, devops, infra role than a product SWE because I spent a lot of time because I talked about spend a good portion of my initial development time setting up the infrastructure for my services / microservices (I.e. the pipelines, security layers. Then locking it behind the VPC and secure endpoints, to make sure the only services authorized to call it can. The integration tests, autoscaling and all things CI/CD) before writing the functional code on top. I thought all great engineers thought about writing a solid scalable foundation before writing their code on top. Do the small companies have lower standards for this / split it between two roles?

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This is despite every interviewer asking me what I was looking for in the role, and me responding that I was a backend engineer that enjoys cloud development work, and I want to stick to backend development work.

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Seems like a red flag thinking about it now

sullen pumice
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ime when you're not the cloud provider, you're not so focused on how to deploy stuff, more the specific features you're developing

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it's also good to write things in a cloud-agnostic way