Detailed

Hi all, I'm a long time lurker on this subreddit, first time poster. I wanted to give back to the community here because a lot of the advice I've gleaned from reading other people's posts have been instrumental in helping me snag offers from a few different places. Below is a full breakdown of my prep and interview timeline, along with some things to look out for. I'm going to be as specific as possible with most details but may need to occasionally be vague so as to not potentially give away who I am (in case people who know me/interviewed me are lurking here too). I'm happy to clarify anything or answer questions! I mainly just want to be helpful to folks as my way of saying thanks for everyone who doesn't gate-keep their own experiences/wisdom. My background: CS degree from a decent university in the US, 10 YOE, tech lead at a small but rapidly growing fintech startup. Have prior experience at a major "unicorn" non-fintech startup as well, which is also where I started my career. I have a lot of hands-on experience with distributed systems and payment rails/processing (the latter was definitely less useful during interviews, though). TL;DR: * Did NeetCode 150 end-to-end \~4-5 times (exact count might be messed up, I lost track after a while). Reviewed every question thoroughly to make sure I understood the underlying logic of how to arrive at the approach. Also completed every question multiple times using every different approach I could think of, some sub-optimal, some more optimal than the provided solution but infeasible to code up in a 20-30 minute interview. * Did some initial interviews with a few startups, completely bombed the first couple because I was rusty, finally got an offer from a startup. Was contacted by Meta around the time of receiving the offer and decided I wanted to try interviewing with a big tech company. Rejected the startup offer. * Used HelloInterview and "Jordan Has No Life" YouTube channel to prep System Design. * Did NOT prep for the behavioral component with Meta, which led to a downleveling (E5 > E4). * Learned from my mistakes, prepped a lot for Amazon/Leadership Principles. Was able to secure an offer for an SDE3/L6 role. * Now evaluating the offers and deciding. --------------------------------------------- Overall timeline: \~7-8 months, start to finish. Weeks 1-2: After I decided to start looking externally, I skimmed through some of the posts on this subreddit, r/cscareerquestions , and some posts on Blind for prep advice. The absolute best advice I saw on was to look at Blind75/Neetcode150 and start there. I watched some of NeetCode's youtube videos and eventually also decided to pay for <a href="https://neetcode.io.