The Night Before

The weekend has come to a close. It was a good one. A friend and I Lyfted up to downtown San Francisco and we walked eight or so miles, stopping by the Twitter HQ and the Airbnb HQ before walking down to Fisherman’s Wharf. We walked around the water for a bit and then Lyfted back to Palo Alto. In total I’d walked around ten miles (or so says my Apple Watch) that day, so I felt I’d gotten a pretty nice look around the city. There’s always more to see, though.

I couldn’t (and still can’t) shake the lingering disappointment giving Apple and Facebook, my original top-two companies, less-than-stellar interviews. To recap, I have offers from LinkedIn, Yelp, and Amazon. I no longer have any interest in Amazon. I would be super excited to work at either LinkedIn or Yelp, but I’m almost certain LinkedIn will absolutely blow Yelp out of the water with its compensation package. I think the two should be pretty similar in technical growth and somewhat similar in prestige, so compensation is a reasonable tiebreaker.

Before my interview tomorrow with Google I have a breakfast with a manager and presumably one of their reports from LinkedIn. I’m really looking forward to that because I can zero in on some specific questions that I’ve wondered that have come up in subsequent interviews. I can get a lot of genuine questions answered, I think. I’m assembling the beginnings of a matrix that compares and contrasts all of the places that will send me offers. There are only three columns now, but maybe I can bump that number up a bit with some luck and a good performance tomorrow (it’s Sunday evening as I type this).

The Interviews (and Closing Thoughts)

It’s now Monday morning and I’m still just thinking about getting an email back from either of the two companies that have yet to make a decision. Google was never my top choice, although it would be a fantastic place to work, pay very well, and they employ some of the smartest developers on the planet. I’m sure if it were my first interview I’d be a lot more concerned about it. Anyway, I’ve gotta go do my interview thing.

Well, that was a trainwreck. I had five interviews, maybe ten questions total, and I would say I answered two correctly. The rest was a complete abomination. I think my brain was in an entirely incompatible mode; all of the questions, save for a few, were very, very different than the 100 or so I’ve been asked over the past week. As a result, I struggled to even reason through many problems. Like, many problems.

Hard problems happen and provide a great opportunity for an interviewer to see how a candidate thinks, but I really just dropped the ball today when it came to communicating. It was just a bad day for me (performance-wise). I don’t know if it was the toll of… 31 technical interviews in the span of a week that finally taking effect or if it was just coincidence that Google happened to be last. I don’t believe there’s any particular reputation for Google giving interviews that shake candidates to their foundations, but they are supposed to be difficult. C’est la vie!

I don’t remember the individual interviews — they all kinda blur together — so I’m not going to break them down. No one interview stood out as particularly bad or particularly good. They were pretty much consistently bad. However, I did finally get rough ranges from LinkedIn, Yelp and Amazon. I still haven’t heard from Apple or Facebook, but I’m mentally writing them off so I can get on with the negotiation. I’m very, very happy with the numbers thrown at me so far. Hurray! They’re definitely enough to get me to move.

I guess this is it. I don’t know if I’ll ever publish this. I think at this point it comes off as braggy because I ended up getting a handful of offers. If anything, it serves as something I can keep forever in my drafts to reflect on. I’ll definitely consolidate this into one post in the future and provide some tips.

Thanks for reading.

(If you’ve read thus far you’re probably familiar with this post, but that shows how it all shook out in the end.)

The Morning Of

I was out like a light before 9pm last night and my alarm woke me up this morning at 5:15am, so this is probably the most well-rested I’ll be for an interview thus far. Nerves are creeping back into my system, probably because Facebook has been somewhat of a dream company for me ever since I started to really embrace iOS development. I’m totally excited to see their campus today as I’ve heard a lot about it.

I’m also somewhat on pins and needles as I await Apple’s decision, which is supposed to come in either today or tomorrow. So far, LinkedIn moved forward during Apple’s interview day and Yelp moved forward during Amazon’s. Thus, it’s only reasonable that $Apple moves forward during Facebook’s. It’s simple pattern recognition. 😊

Prep-wise I’m going to continue employing my strategy of not doing any cramming to keep my mind clear. It’s thus far been the strategy I’ve used and I’ve done on four interviews, so I won’t rock the boat. I don’t think I was provided an itinerary for my interviews today, so I don’t have anything to list. I’ll probably edit one in after the fact without times, but I’ll at least be able to provide the sequencing. (Edit: truth.)

11:15pm-12:00pm: culture fit w/ engineering manager, whiteboard coding

12:00pm-12:45pm: whiteboard coding

12:45pm-1:45pm: lunch

1:45pm-2:30pm: mobile system design

2:30pm-3:15pm: mobile whiteboard coding

I’m in the lobby now waiting for my point of contact to come and greet me, and wow, I can definitely tell that I want to do well in this interview in particular. I don’t feel so hot physically, which is a feeling I’m all too familiar with from the phone screens. I have another 30 minutes before my interviews are supposed to start, though, so maybe it’s good that I’m early and it’ll all die down, leaving me fully there physically (and mentally) so I can do my best. Either that or it just gives me an extra 30 minutes of nausea. 🤒

I think the worst thing that could happen between now and 11:00am — the start of my interview — is getting a rejection from Apple. I’d be pretty bummed about that. Maybe I should just abstain from reading my email. Just kidding, I’m totally incapable of doing that. At least it’s nice and sunny both inside and outside at this building so I don’t feel like I’m trapped in a dungeon. I get enough of that in the interview rooms each day.

My recruiter just reached out to me and asked my shirt size so I can get a swag bag of stuff. That’s pretty awesome. I think some part of me should say “no, it’s not awesome to provide free advertising to a company, and it’s less awesome to be excited about it”, but the rest of me is saying wow free stuff!. I guess I’ll close down now if I’m going to be meeting up with my recruiter soon so I don’t seem weird blogging about a bunch of stuff instead of, like, preparing.

The Interviews

It went ok. To recap:

11:15pm-12:00pm: Culture fit w/ engineering manager, whiteboard coding

I felt this interview went very well. I got a lot of good insight into the company and the company’s benefits, but also a good look into what the manager felt the company’s weaknesses were. They seemed pretty honest to me, too, and they gave me a bit to think about. The coding part sounded extremely intimidating to start, but eventually it boiled down to a very simple problem. No concerns here.

12:00pm-12:45pm: Whiteboard coding

This was a language-agnostic whiteboard coding interview. The first question was very straightforward. I hadn’t seen anything like it in the past, but it was trivial to see a solution. The second problem I stumbled on for 5–10 minutes as I continued to try to brute-force solve something in a really ugly way before a couple hints from the interviewer prompted me to do something far more elegant and a lot less stupid. I eventually got to an answer we both seemed satisfied with, but if they wanted me to get it right off the bat or with no hints, I may have blown it here.

12:45pm-1:45pm: Lunch

No feedback. Nice, honest conversation.

1:45pm-2:30pm: Mobile system design

This was my worst interview by far. Not just of the day, but on the trip. From the very beginning I think I got off on the wrong foot because I had trouble understanding my interviewer and I think it came off as offensive. We worked through the problem together and didn’t even get through all of the requirements in the time we had. Unfortunately, I think my interviewer was laughing at me during a few of my questions and considered them silly questions. I tried to gather requirements, probably by force of habit because every other design interview likes to see you do so, and each time I’d get a chuckle and a “I don’t know, it’s your interview, design it and find the tradeoffs”.

Oh well. It wasn’t a miserable experience, but it’s definitely the most uncomfortable I’ve been in an interview this week. If I don’t get an offer I’m like 85% sure it’s because of blowing this interview. I think my brain was just in the wrong mode.

2:30pm-3:15pm: Mobile whiteboard coding

This interview had a pretty straightforward question in Objective-C to start. It also brought my first set of Objective-C specific language questions. I forgot a line of code, but once he pointed that out, I quickly identified what needed to be added and why. He asked me to theorize about some iOS stuff and I was happy with what I came up with on the spot.

The next problem went a lot worse. First, I solved a simple happy-path case, but I struggled a ton on fighting the other cases. I started to go down a path of extreme complication and I was cautioned that I was vastly overcomplicating things. For some reason an answer just dawned on me after that and I smooth-sailed it to an optimal solution. If they wanted me to instantly solve it optimally, though, this was another place I could have blown it.

Closing Thoughts

Overall, this is probably the worst interview performance I had on this trip (and, honestly, in my full-time career). I felt one interview was a 4/4, two interviews were 3/4, and the last interview was a 1/4 or a 2/4. That’s not a very good average. Overall, though, I feel confident that I’m “good enough” to work at Facebook and I should just be prepared for a design interview where I just make every decision as opposed to soliciting design requirements. I think I expected a different interview format and didn’t understand until way too late what my interviewer was looking for.

In other news, Amazon called me to say they would extend an offer next week, so that’s cool. With that, LinkedIn, Yelp, and Amazon have all said they’d like to extend offers, while Apple and Facebook will give me a thumbs up or a thumbs down by mid-next week.

Just one company left! I don’t really care about how Google goes on Monday. They’re prestigious, but I don’t particularly want to work there anymore. I guess I’m just excited to be done with all of this so I’m mentally phoning it in. I’ll still show up and do my best, but I’m far more interested in the fact that on Monday I may get numbers from LinkedIn, Yelp, Apple, and Amazon if everything goes perfectly. That would make for a very fine start to my week. I guess in some ways, a fine start to the next step in my career.

The Morning Of

Day 5 is upon me!

First, I have to switch to my third hotel of the trip (and it’s not even the last) and hope they let me check-in early. It’s a 20 minute drive from here, so I suppose I’ll grab some coffee, maybe breakfast, and Lyft over there. I have an interview with Amazon today, but that too is a 20 minute drive from the next hotel. I don’t remember if Amazon left it up to me to book something or asked me where I wanted to stay or what, but I proactively requested that they extend Facebook’s stay so I didn’t have to go through five hotels.

Heading into this trip, I fully expected Amazon’s interview to be far and away the easiest of the six companies (purely based on how people talk about them online). However, with how well Monday and Tuesday went, I feel like it may end up being a bit harder than those. On top of today’s interview, I also expect to get some sort of initial offer from LinkedIn today, assuming they don’t require references first, and I expect Yelp to “move forward” in the process and get references from me. Apple probably won’t get back to me until Monday.

I’m pretty much stress-free right now. I still have three hours before my interview, but I’m used to it at this point and there’s enough good news and built-up confidence that I don’t think too much about “but what if this goes terribly?!”. Here’s the itinerary for today:

10:30am-11:15am: behavioral+algorithm interview

11:15am-12:00pm: hiring manager team fit interview

12:00pm-1:15pm: feedback-free lunch

1:15pm-2:00pm: behavioral+algorithm+mobile design interview

2:00pm-3:00pm: behavioral+algorithm interview

3:00pm-3:45pm: mobile design interview

Anyway, I’ll write some more after the interview. Peace!

The Interviews

Well. I think the interview went very well, far better than any of my first three. However, I don’t think I’ll accept any offer they may send, regardless of compensation. It’s probably easy to say that because Amazon is not known for high comp packages. Because I’m looking for technical growth and learning opportunities primarily, I just don’t think this would be a good fit for me, plus the vibe of the office turned me off. Anyway, to the interview:

10:30am-11:15am: Behavioral+algorithm interview

Every interview started with a large volume of behavioral questions drawing on previous experiences at work. None of the behavioral interviews I had today went poorly so I won’t really talk about them any more than I have already. We jumped straight into a language-agnostic coding question and I thought it went well. The interviewer did seem to criticize my use of Objective-C instead of another language, but I’m totally in the ObjC mode right now and I’m not about to pull out the C++ for one interview.

My general strategy when I hear a problem is to solve it naively, explain it’s a naive approach, then explain how I’d optimize it. I do that so I don’t try to optimize something before fully implementing it; sometimes optimizing leads to less intuitive code, so I’d rather prove I know what’s going on first, then make it better.

Unfortunately, my interviewer told me that my approach was unusual, and when I offered to optimize it (and I explained how I would), he said I didn’t need to, yet recorded what I’d written as my official response. I think if I were more excited by the company I would have protested a bit, but I didn’t say anything. He then tweaked the problem, I erased what I’d done, implemented the optimal solution, and that was that.

11:15am-12:00pm: Hiring manager team fit interview

This was essentially an extended version of the behavioral interviews I ended up having throughout the day. Nothing notable; as I said, I won’t spend a bunch of time talking about these, as they’re highly personal. If I were to give a nugget of advice: make sure you remember how all of your projects at work went and make sure you have lots of projects to draw stories from.

12:00pm-1:15pm: Lunch

I had a nice conversation with an employee outside of my interview loop and we talked about career stuff. Where he’d worked, how he likes the industry, how he likes mobile programming. I checked my phone during one bathroom break at lunch and saw Yelp wants to move forward with an offer, meaning I now have two offers to consider. Still no numbers from either, though.

1:15pm-2:00pm: Behavioral+algorithm+mobile design interview

This interview was fine. Lots of behavioral stuff again, a pretty routine and easy-to-digest algorithm problem, and then a high-level design question. We then built on it as he added more constraints. It wasn’t particularly mobile-focused, but he had me stub out some methods in Objective-C. He seemed happy with it and we ended quite a bit early.

2:00pm-3:00pm: Behavioral+algorithm interview

I interviewed with someone remotely for this hour. I talked to him on speakerphone (there was no video) and we used a CoderPad-style website for my responses. I didn’t ask why I was being interviewed remotely; normally I would assume it’s because someone was OOO or temporarily in another office or it’s their most senior developer, but this guy was on a different team entirely in a different city.

The question posed in this interview definitely took me the longest of any question I’ve had this week. The question was extremely — and intentionally — vague, so it took me a good bit to get all of the problem’s constraints out of my interviewer. Once I did, I iterated closer to an answer. I made use of methods I hadn’t implemented (so, for example, I would say “I’m going to call this method which will do xyz to my array, so I can do abc”) to speed things up and he was fine with that. He had me implement a few of those methods and a few he was fine with not being implemented.

After that, he added another constraint to the problem, which ended up adding, like, one line of code, so it sounded scarier than it actually was. I asked a handful of culture questions (another tip: pace yourself with asking these questions, and make sure there’s a lot you want to know about the company heading into the interview day) and that was that.

3:00pm-3:45pm: Mobile design interview

I actually thought I was done at this point due to a typo on the itinerary that was emailed to me. Oops. Two more interviewers walked in, did some behavioral questioning, and moved on to a mobile design question. This was somewhat similar to the design question I’d solved earlier in the day and also similar to mobile design questions at both LinkedIn and Yelp. The lead interviewer just added more and more constraints until time was up, I asked a few questions, and I was escorted out.

Closing Thoughts

I’d be pretty surprised if I didn’t get an offer based on how the interviews went. If they didn’t feel I was a good culture fit I could see a rejection. I tend to be pretty self-critical and think much less of my performance than would otherwise be fair, but I was definitely confident about this one. I didn’t ask how long it would be until I heard back because I’m not all that worried about the response.

I have Facebook tomorrow, which was the interview I was most excited for heading into the trip. Almost just as exciting: after that, it’s the weekend! 🎉

A contemporaneous account of my 2018 interview gauntlet

The Morning Of

I think I’m largely out of nerves to worry about. I still feel a little bit of nervousness because I’m going to spend 4–5 hours with engineers trying to find out where my ability ends, and it’s never fun to reach the point where you realize you’re out of knowledge if other people are trying to hear it. It’s motivating to hit that point when you’re building out your own project, but it’s a different situation with someone grilling you.

I wasn’t provided an itinerary today and I’m not going to divulge any details about my interviews today. I’ll still update about how I’m feeling and if I finally hit my “bombed” interview. From a compensation standpoint, I’d love to get as many offers as possible, obviously. However, both of the places I’ve interviewed so far I’ve really enjoyed (although I enjoyed each in entirely different ways), so I’d be thrilled to work at either place. Each additional company is icing. That being said, I could totally end up working at Apple, Amazon, Facebook, or Google. As I said when I first started this chronicle, I’d be thrilled at any of these tech giants.

I’m at a bagel shop and I just wrapped up breakfast. My interview is in about three hours, so I guess I’ll go explore a bit around the area. I’ve resolved that I’m done studying/preparing on this trip until I hit a road bump. Once I have an interview that shows “hey, you really don’t know $topic as well as you thought”, I can brush up on that. However, until I hit that point, I’m confident I can come up with things on the spot. I’ve already encountered multiple questions that I’ve never seen before and I’ve figured them out on the spot. Building that confidence actually ends up helping my performance. It’s like self-reinforcing good stuff!

Anyway, I’m closing my laptop now. I probably won’t write anything ore until after my interview, which ends around 5:00pm, the latest end time of any of my interviews.

The Interviews (and Closing Thoughts)

It’s now 8:28pm. Today went well. It went worse than the two previous days, but five minutes before I went in to check-in at reception for today’s interview, LinkedIn called me to say they were very impressed by my interviews and they were excited to move forward with an offer. No numbers from yet.

I’ll keep this one short because I’m spooked by Apple. I had five interviews in total today. I think I did exceptionally well on two of them (algorithmic stuff and culture fit stuff), I did decently on two of them (language-y stuff), and I did just ok on one of them (design stuff). My voice is seriously starting to fade and I’m only halfway done. On the other hand — I’m halfway done!

I’m cautiously optimistic that I’m 3/3 thus far when it comes to offers. Each company had some extremely cool facets to their organization and no company has given me any reason to bump them off of my “super excited to work there” list.

Although I have to switch hotels again tonight, I’m super happy that I’m over halfway done with the week. While I have an interview on Monday, I get an entire weekend to hang out with a friend and just chill, so I should be pretty fresh at that point. Apple says they’ll get back to me this Friday (it’s Wednesday now) at the earliest and most likely Monday. I think Yelp will extend an offer tomorrow. Exciting times!

The Morning Of

I’ll keep my preamble for today short. I slept decent (in that I slept at all), my interview jitters are largely gone (though not completely), and I’m feeling good headed into today. It was hard to gauge where I stood in the world — was all of my confidence unfounded? — headed into this trip. Yesterday validated that I’m at least somewhat competent.

Even if LinkedIn doesn’t ultimately submit an offer, I held my own, so I no longer think “complete catastrophe” is a potential outcome of this trip. I expected yesterday’s interview to be probably the third hardest, and if I did alright there, I expect to do alright at a few other places as well, including today. My schedule for the day at Yelp:

11:30am-12:30pm: Lunch with team

12:45pm-1:00pm: meet with recruiter

1:00pm-1:45pm: Mobile interview #1

1:45pm-2:30pm: Mobile interview #2

2:30pm-3:15pm: Mobile interview #3

3:15pm–4:00pm: Mobile interview #4

4:00pm-4:15pm: meet with recruiter

Au revoir!

The Interviews

It’s now 8:27pm and I fully fed from some food on Fisherman’s Wharf. Well, sorta. It was from a hotel nearby because I didn’t want to use Yelp’s reimbursement to fund a $50 entrée on the oceanfront. It was good, but now I just feel like passing out, especially after the hour I took Lyfting back from San Francisco. My Lyft driver played some pretty sweet Brazilian music the entire way back, though. He sang along, too. Neat. As for how each interview went:

11:30am-12:30pm: Lunch with team

This was super cool and practical. It really helped me envision myself as part of the team and how I would like it. Were people friendly? How was the banter? How off-color were things? Was there a lot of laughter? Did people seem bummed to be at work? There’s a lot you can glean from unscripted conversation for an hour between five people, and I thought it provided very valuable insight. I ate super light because interviews make me nervous and the last thing I want to think about it “wow, I sure don’t feel good” when I’m being stumped by some algorithm problem.

12:45pm-1:00pm: Meet with recruiter

This didn’t really happen. I spoke to my recruiter for maybe two minutes as she escorted me to my interview room.

1:00pm-1:45pm: Mobile interview #1

This interview started off pretty heavy into my resume. I was asked about the process at my current company, previous projects that I’d worked on, stuff like that.

I’m totally not afraid of going into extreme detail about anything on my resume (at least that I remember; some things from internships five years ago I may be pretty hazy on), so I have no problem with lots of probing questions about past experience. I felt I accurately described my role on various things. If I have any takeaways from this, it’s know your resume and don’t embellish anything. It may get you past a recruiter screen, but you’re totally dead in the water if you’re called on it.

I was also asked an algorithmic question at the end of this interview. I did ok. I ultimately came up with a working solution with an ugly-ish runtime, he gave a hint, and I took the hint and explained how we could change it to achieve the optimal runtime. I think I’d only feel super confident about an algorithm interview if I answered everything flawlessly and coded it perfectly, which is mostly impractical. I didn’t “ace” the coding portion, but overall, it went well.

1:45pm-2:30pm: Mobile interview #2

This interview started off with another extensive-ish review of portions of my resume. Whereas the first interview asked me a lot about the kinds of issues I have with mobile programming, strengths, weaknesses, things like that, this was far more language focused. I was asked between 10 and 15 questions specific to Swift, Objective-C, UIKit, or general mobile programming things. I was pretty upfront that I only had a working knowledge of Swift and I answered all but maybe one or two without any clarifications. I’m not concerned with how I did during that “knowledge” portion of the interview.

The coding question here was less algorithmic and more practical. It started with a simple “you have this API, implement these three methods provided this UI”. We built on that and continued to add more constraints to the problem. I can’t say I did perfectly because there was definitely one part of the interview where the approach I suggested wasn’t what my interviewer had in mind, but once he suggested looking at a certain alternative, I was able to explain how you’d use that alternative to solve the problem a different way.

2:30pm-3:15pm: Mobile interview #3

This interview, again, went into my resume, and also asked a lot about why I wanted to work in mobile specifically. We talked a bit about what drove me, why I was seeking new opportunities, things like that. I had a lot of fun talking about why I love what I do and why I love mobile specifically. After we chatted about me for a bit, we moved on to the more test-ish part of the interview.

The rest of the interview was system design focused. While the previous one was more “we have this screen, implement these methods, what are the considerations”, this was far more “we have this idea, how would you wire all of this up?”. There’s not too much more I can add, as these interviews are all pretty similar. They allow interviewers to just keep probing to find out where your deficiencies are (we all have them) and do a good job, I imagine, of sizing a candidate up. I misunderstood a few things along the way, but I clarified enough that I think we were on the same page.

Eventually we got to a design question that I’ve never really solved in my own programming, so I had to explain different approaches, but I also had to add why I was hesitant to fully endorse any one of those approaches, because none of them felt “clean”. While I’d obviously prefer that I had a great answer for everything, I thought I did fine overall. I didn’t “ace” this one either, but I held my own.

3:15pm–4:00pm: Mobile interview #4

This was with the manager I’d spoken with earlier. He was really personable and conversation flowed very naturally. I got to geek out about a bunch of stuff I’d worked on and a bunch of my programming hobbies. I was asked why I wanted to work for this company in particular for the second or third time, but I was able to go into a lot more depth this time. I had a ton of fun going over my resume in this interview for that reason. And yes, I went over my resume four times, although different interviewers highlighted different portions. There wasn’t any real overlap past super basic questions that everyone wanted answered.

We then moved on to the coding portion. This was probably my best coding interview of the day; I solved the initial problem in a minute or two, and I solved follow-ups in less than five minutes. I did let part of the problem slip my mind at one point, so I explained an approach that was pointlessly complex. I resolved it and corrected myself when he asked again if I needed to do it that way, so that was more a case of me not thinking. I was happy with how I did in this interview.

4:00pm-4:15pm: meet with recruiter

This was short and sweet. We just talked about deadlines and how long it would take to hear back. The recruiter was warm and easy to talk to and she was the one that ultimately escorted me out.

Closing Thoughts

So I guess that’s that. Because nothing stood out today compared to yesterday’s botched starter code issue, I probably did better today than I did yesterday in the eyes of my interviewers. I’m cautiously optimistic about both now.

For a small recap: I flew in on Sunday (after multiple delays and the most uncomfortable flight of my life), didn’t really sleep, interviewed for five hours on Monday, slept, woke up early on Tuesday, Lyfted to my new hotel, checked in, Lyfted an hour downtown, interviewed for five hours, Lyfted an hour back, and now I’m here. Finally, my interview tomorrow is at 12:45pm and I don’t have to switch hotels, meaning I can actually catch up on sleep.

Regardless of what offer(s) I receive or ultimately sign take, it’s important to me that I do well tomorrow for a lot of personal reasons. I’ve always wanted to do well at an interview with tomorrow’s company. Thankfully, due to the first two days going pretty well, most of my nerves are gone (for now).

Until tomorrow!🙂

Interviewing at Six Silicon Valley Giants in Six Days: Day 2 @ Yelp was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Morning Of

I didn’t really sleep last night. I didn’t sleep particularly poorly, but I woke up hourly and checked the clock to make sure I hadn’t overslept, despite it being more or less pitch-black outside. I decided to pass some time waiting for the continental breakfast to open up by looking at some classic Leetcode problems and similar problems as they popped up (4Sum and its variants, subset sum and its variants). It went ok.

I’m of the mind that a bunch of studying the night before/the morning of has more potential for harm than good; I’m not going to learn anything new (at best, I’d recall something quicker in the interview) and there’s every chance I hit a problem that locks me up and then I feel super discouraged heading into the next day/the interview. I think practicing on a bunch of easy problems would help.

I filled up a bit on breakfast with some very subpar turkey sausage and a yogurt, plus a coffee. I don’t really feel that I need to caffeinate right now, but I’d rather be a little bit more caffeinated than yawning. This is the last I’ll write before I’m out of the meat grinder. As a reminder, if I had to guess, this is one of the interviews I was feeling more confident about, as I believe I have the skillset that they’re seeking. We’ll see how misplaced that confidence soon enough.

My schedule today is as follows:

9:45am–10:00am: meeting with recruiter

10:00am-11:00am: iOS-specific programming

11:00am–12:00pm: speak w/ hiring manager; review career goals, resume

12:00pm-1:00pm: lunch w/ engineer

1:00pm-2:00pm: mobile system design whiteboard interview

2:00pm-3:00pm: algorithmic whiteboard interview

And off I go! 😱

The Interviews

I’m actually writing this the following morning (Tuesday) because I was just so exhausted. As for how the interview went, I’ll break it down piece-by-piece. I will, of course, avoid giving any concrete questions, but I may comment on the difficulty. To “set the scene”, I was put in a small room for the duration of the day, save for lunch. Interviewers would come in and out as their time slot came up.

9:45am–10:00am: Meeting with recruiter

My recruiter ended up being late and I had to text someone to get the ball rolling. It wasn’t a big deal; I assume that the recruiter primarily wants to put candidates at ease as it benefits everyone if the interviewee does well. We eventually teleconferenced and talked a bit about the day ahead until he said he saw people at the door behind me, meaning it was time to pass me off.

10:00am-11:00am: iOS-specific programming

I was interviewed by two mobile engineers on a laptop. I had some starter code and they asked me to develop a workflow that they loosely described. I had to dig a little bit to get the requirements for the screens they wanted, plus I had to wrap my head around some of the starter code infrastructure that I was supposed to use. There were some hiccups along the way; there was no one point in the interview where I was “stuck” in that I didn’t know what to do or how to do something properly, but the starter code had a small, but critical, issue that wasn’t supposed to be there (unless it was some next-level find-the-bug testing and they faked confusion) that cost me a decent amount of time testing.

I plugged along, unable to iteratively test what I had done, but once we resolved the starter code issue, I was able to test what I’d done up to that point. Thankfully, that stuff all worked. Unfortunately, I was only able to get through maybe 60% or 70% of the problem. They saved some time at the end to review different things that I’d done in the project. There were definitely corners I cut due to time; some things I discussed along the way and left comments explaining (i.e. with more time, I’d separate this to another class/enum etc), and some things they pointed out and I explained why my approach was suboptimal and what could be done to improve it.

Overall, I was happy with how this interview went. It’s a bummer I couldn’t get through it all; I don’t think the starter code problem cost me that much time, so I’m not sure what I should improve on in the future to improve my performance there. I much prefer building my UIs programmatically, so maybe that takes a lot longer than people that don’t do so? Maybe a lot of people don’t finish? Either way, both interviewers were very friendly, they both seemed very competent, and I did as well as I think I could have. I’m ok with not doing well in an interview because they’re looking for someone different/better than me, but I’m not ok not doing well because my brain locked down. This was definitely me at normal working pace/ability.

11:00am–12:00pm: Speak w/ hiring manager; review career goals, resume

I don’t have a ton to say about this interview because you’d have to be there to really “get” it. It was very insightful and I had a wonderful conversation about culture, process, and life at LinkedIn. The manager I’d spoken with exhibited the sort of traits I would like in a manager: he was soft-spoken (in that he wasn’t abrasive), but he seemed to have convictions. He spoke positively of his team members at every chance he could get. Lastly, he just seemed to “get it”. The sort of things he looks for in a team or engineer align closely with what I want to be or traits I think that I already show a bit of. We hardly touched my resume; it was far more open-ended than that, and primarily I walked him through what I do now process-wise and what drives me.

I was happy with how I did in this interview, but I don’t think it’s something you can really say you did “bad” or “good” in. You just put yourself out there and provide another data point to the company to see if you’re what they look for in an engineer. I can’t know for certain what that is at this company, but if it’s what they espoused when I spoke to them, I suppose it would go in the “good” category.

12:00pm-1:00pm: Lunch w/ engineer

Not much to say here. I don’t have any stories or information to back this up, but I imagine this interview is a sanity check. I don’t think you can get a job based on a lunch interview in the middle of four technical interviews, but I absolutely think you can lose a job if you’re a rude or hateful person. I like to think I’m neither of those things, so I don’t think my lunch interview will work against me, which is the most you can ask for. The food was good and my interviewer was really cool, for what it’s worth.

1:00pm-2:00pm: Mobile system design whiteboard interview

This was my most exhausting interview by far. It was the first whiteboard interview of the day and it’s a system design interview, which means nonstop talking. Companies want to hear how you think, and interviews like this really dig into that. They basically never end. There are an infinite number of things that can be thrown at you. Once you’re “done”, there’s a new feature added and you explain how you’d do that. I didn’t stop talking for about an hour so I was wiped by the end of it. My interviewer was great to work with on the question. I think we had a really good dialogue throughout about different tradeoffs and approaches. If he didn’t like something I did, he would ask probing questions about it, and usually I was able to communicate deficiencies and suggest alternatives. I think it’s hard to “fake it” in this interview. I was happy with how I did. I don’t think anything stood out to me as particularly bad or detrimental to my case in the hour that I spoke.

2:00pm-3:00pm: Algorithmic whiteboard interview

This is the one interview I was worried about headed into the day, and I’m happy it was at the end of the day. I’m reasonably confident about my iOS and design chops because it’s what I do day-to-day, but contrived algorithm problems are not what I do day-to-day. They absolutely come up, and it’s important that you get them right, but often it’s when I’m building some new subsystem or something. I’m not usually evaluating the big-O of my layout fixes. That being said, I have a decent background (at this point) in the algorithmic field of interviews, so I wasn’t terrified, but I definitely thought it would be my weak point of the day. At a minimum, it represented my highest chance of failure.

My interviewer was very kind and easy to go back-and-forth with. I used Objective-C on the whiteboard but he wasn’t particularly concerned with the language. He explained/diagrammed my problem. I asked a few questions and ran through a few examples to make sure I really understood what he was asking. This, by the way, isn’t just something you should do to “look good” to an interviewer. It’s critical to make sure you’re solving the right problem. After I made sure we were on the same page, I rattled off the ideas that came to mind. I suggested a few algorithms and clarified a few points when it came to how they applied to my problem. Ultimately, after writing the code on the board, fixing issues as I wrote them, and finally running through a handful of test cases (and tweaking a few things), I told my interviewer I was happy. He seemed to agree, I gave him the correct complexities, and we moved on to the next problem.

He drew the next question on the board. I thought it was a simple enough problem to come up with a naïve solution to, so I explained what the first solution that jumped to mind was. He agreed it would work and asked me to improve it (so I didn’t code my original idea). I visualized the problem in my head and followed along on the board and suggested an approach he seemed happy with. Once I told him the approach (I hadn’t written any code yet), he tweaked the problem somewhat significantly. I had seen the second problem before, but he was merging it was the first problem. I told him I somewhat remember the algorithm to solve the second one and I explained how I’d apply it to the first problem. He seemed content, so I began writing my code.

Because I was dealing with multiple problems now, I wrote my method signature out for the root question. I then filled out everything assuming I’d already written code to solve the two problems it was composed of. I asked if he wanted me to write code for both of those. He indicated yes, so I wrote both. There was a small bug that took me 3 or 4 minutes to solve in one of the methods, but ultimately I finished it up and explained the complexities. He said that was all he had for me and I think it was at about 3:00 on the dot.

I either got very lucky in that I barely finished on time or they just ask questions until time is up to see how deep your knowledge goes/where it falls short. Regardless, I think I did well. If anything, it may have been the strong point of my day, although I thought the system design interview went well, too.

Closing Thoughts

Afterwards, I hung out with my brother who flew out to spend half of the week with me to assist my sanity. We hit up a really nice British gastropub in Sunnyvale called The Oxford. I had a drink and some really delicious food. I even indulged in avocado toast! I’m so in vogue. I passed out pretty quickly when I got back to the hotel and actually slept last night.

My recruiter did call me pretty quickly after the last interview (within 30 minutes) to ask how things went. He had told me he would do so, so it wasn’t a surprise or indicative of good or bad news. He said the feedback from the manager was positive and he probed a bit about how I feel about working at LinkedIn compared to the other places I’m interviewing. I told him that LinkedIn was definitely in my top tier of companies and I’d be excited to work there. I know you’re not supposed to show your hand with recruiters to maximize your cash, but it won’t really impact my negotiations, if I have any, later. Maybe they’ll use it against me. I don’t know! I have interviews to worry about. 😬

Interviewing at Six Silicon Valley Giants in Six Days: Day 1 @ LinkedIn was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I used to blog on another, pseudonym-less Medium account. I’ve had these diary-esque entries saved in my drafts for the last two and a half years and I thought they might be interesting to folks that have interviews ahead of them. I’ll post these weekly (or something). In total, there are seven parts.

Intro

To help keep my mind off of things — my upcoming interview performance, in particular — I’ve decided to keep an ongoing record of my upcoming Hell Trip™. After a preliminary job hunt and a lot of phone calls (something I’ll post about in the future, along with some tips I’ve learned along the way) it’s resulted in this: I will fly from $MyCity and between August 13th and August 20th I will attend six onsite interviews at major Silicon Valley companies in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I’ll also be using my time outside of interviewing hours to hang out with friends and family, some of whom live in the area and some of whom will be flying in to explore the city with me. The companies range from $4 billion market caps to $1 trillion (…), but they are all very technically exciting to me.

While I’ve made posts in the past about extensively applying to jobs, I’m pretty happy with where I’m at now, and I’m not going to give it up for anything less than perfect (or close to it). I didn’t even start this job hunt; three companies reached out to me independently and I followed up with them. Thus, I only applied to maybe 20 companies this go-around, and I only applied to companies with (very) large mobile presences.

I’m a lover of mobile development, iOS in particular, so going somewhere, like, I don’t know, Microsoft, wasn’t something on my immediate radar. It’s probably a great place to learn and grow and I’m sure it pays very well, but I’m laser-focused on mobile development right now. In total, six of the 20 or so companies I applied to followed up to get me on the phone and those are the six places I’ll be interviewing at.

I don’t really know what will become of this post; I’m going to avoid describing technical particulars both due to NDAs I have (or will have shortly) at a few of the companies and because that knowledge is available elsewhere. There are only a few blogs that describe the “other stuff”: mental preparation, logistics, interpersonal tips, things like that. It’s also just going to be a general post about my day-to-day, sort of like a mundane vlog (but without the video) or typical blog (without the useful information). It’s the kind of blog I would like to read, but not the kind of blog that people looking for interview hacks will want to read. Most importantly, it’s the kind of blog future me will want to reflect on. Maybe I can glean some interview hacks from that. I’ve never had a truly “hardcore” onsite technical interview before, but in ten days’ time I’ll have about 25 of them to reflect on. Yikes!

The Day Before

My flight out was paid for by LinkedIn and departs at 1:30 today (a Sunday), so I woke up early and went out for coffee and breakfast at my favorite $MyCity-area coffee shop. It’s a little family owned shop that’s newish to the city — newer than me, at least — but it’s gained quite a bit of traction at this point. I overheard one of the baristas talking about how they’re opening up another shop, presumably due to the success of the first. Although I’m “exploring opportunities” outside of $MyCity at the moment, that makes me happy.

I get super nervous for phone interviews, but in the limited experience I’ve had with onsite interviews, I feel mostly fine. I feel like the magnitude of the upcoming week hasn’t really hit me, so I anticipate either feeling very anxious tonight or pretty sickly tomorrow morning.

There’s a two hour time difference between $MyCity and Silicon Valley which will benefit me quite a bit. I’ve been going to bed earlier and earlier to help prepare myself for waking up early. I think a lot of people worry about waking up late for a final exam. I worry about waking up late for an interview that I’ve kinda-sorta been preparing for since 2012.

I’m at the $AirportName now starting this post. I connect through Dallas-Fort Worth International and I’ll ultimately land at San Jose International around 6:30 Pacific time. Hopefully I can get to sleep early, although the 9:45am start tomorrow is really an 11:45am start for my $MyState brain, and looming anxiety will likely ensure I wake up on time regardless. I’ve done an extensive amount of studying over the last three months, starting from next to nothing and eventually reaching the present point, where I’m cautiously optimistic about my chances. I haven’t deluded myself into thinking I’m 6/6 material, but if things go my way, I can delude myself into thinking I’m, like, 4/6 material. Right now, if I had to guess, I would guess my offers go, chronologically, like so: ✔️✔️❌✔️✔️❌.

I would be absolutely ecstatic if that happened, for the record. When I was interviewing during my senior year of college there were a few companies I interviewed at to make sure I had any employment and not because I was excited about the company or product. Now, I’m very excited about each and every company on my list, which makes any offer like Christmas in J̶u̶l̶y̶ August.

On the flipside, I won’t be nearly as crushed if I whiff on all six as I would have felt whiffing in college, where I’d be staring down the barrel of unemployment. My ego will absolutely take a devastating hit, though, as I’ve always thought to myself that I could work in Silicon Valley if I wanted to. I may have to contend with the fact that that statement isn’t true, at least at the present moment.

I don’t think I’m amazing or a wunderkind that companies should feel honored to speak to. Those sorts of descriptors should be reserved for people like Mike Ash or Chris Lattner. Oh, how I aspire to possess the knowledge people like Mike and Chris have. I’m pretty confident I have the passion for it, at least. Anyway, I just think I know a bit about mobile programming and development and have enough experience that I could provide value to these companies, even if they have a high hiring bar. I’m hoping that surrounding myself with technically likeminded individuals can help me grow and maybe even flourish, too. I think I’ve sold myself on each of these six companies holding up that end of the bargain. I just have to sell each of them that I can hold up mine.

My flight is about to take off, so I suppose it’s time to begin my journey (yes, that sounds awfully cheesy…).

One last update: my initial flight was delayed by an hour, so my airline put me on a different connecting flight. I landed at DFW and it turns out my original flight was delayed, so I could still make it. I spoke to the gate agent and was put on standby, which ultimately put me on my original connection. However, I spent the next three and a half hours sandwiched in the worst middle-seat imaginable. A pleasant start. However, I haven’t eaten in 12 hours, so I’ve got some Panda to dig into.