Reflections

So I decided to make this post because I recently finished up a decent number of interviews at Staff/Principal level and, prior to those interviews, spent a lot of time scouring online for accounts like this from real people and found a complete dearth of it. Most of the content I was able to find was provided by people who exclusively make money on interview training, was focused primarily on new grad through Senior developers, was woefully out of date, or was focused on being promoted from within or being successful after you land the job (StaffEng.com). So I wanted to give back to share for people who may be in a similar position. First, a very uninteresting Sankey Diagram of the overall experience. Basic Background: * Remote worker in the midwest US * 12 YOE * Wasn't even looking to make a move, just wanted to explore my market rate The other relevant piece is that, before beginning the search, I was already employed at big tech company at Staff/Principal level. While I am certain this helped in my case, particularly with things like obtaining interviews, I should also mention I have been at the same company for a long time. Well beyond what most in this industry would consider normal. I also had not done interviews in ages (Though I've conducted hundreds), and had been fully promoted to the level from within, so I truly had no idea what to expect. What I Expected Going In * I knew the market was hot, so getting interest wouldn't be a problem. Started with a stack of recruiter mails in my inbox from day one. * I was expecting a fair amount of coding in my interviews, particularly LeetCode-style problems. * I was expecting a lot of highly-structured System Design interviews. * I was expecting to be interviewed by people at Staff level or above. * I was expecting the process to be fairly streamlined and maybe even a little extra care and attention given the level I'd be coming in at and the demand for it. * I was expecting to get rejected a lot. More rejections than successes, actually. * I was expecting to be given offers that would be higher than my current pay, but not by much given my location. How I Prepared Knowing those expectations above, I did spend some time "studying" but given I wasn't actually planning to move companies, it was far less than what I often see on here. In all I solved a couple dozen leetcode problems and otherwise just browsed solutions for a few dozen more. I did not look at DDIA to study, but I did already have the book and had read it years ago (When I would argue it was far more relevant). I did not use any "Passing the System Design Interview" style online guides beyond reading a couple of the freely available ones on "Grokking the System Design Interview", but I did definitely go read blogs, watch videos, and skim whitepapers on some actual production systems (HDFS, Reddit, Slack, Uber, etc). What I Actually Experienced You can probably tell by how I phrased a lot of those expectations above where many of these are going. Where to even begin? On Coding Problems I did 7 phone screens and five on-sites, all of these with major tech companies. All 7 phone screens involved a coding problem. After that, they practically ceased to exist. Two companies did not even ask me a single additional coding question during the on-site. Of the coding questions I did get, only three were "LeetCode" style coding problems, all required nothing but hashtables and arrays, and all were very straightforward to solve by someone who writes algorithms on a fairly regular basis. No dynamic programming, no topological sort, no recalling tries or reimplementing binary search like there's not a library for it. All-in all, pleasantly surprised here and glad I did not "grind leetcode" for weeks on end. On System Design This one was just as big of a surprise. If you follow the guides and watch the videos, they are nothing like the real interview experience. The real interview experience has so much more back and forth and veers off into totally arbitrary directions. Also nobody cares about capacity estimation. The only thing even remotely relevant to what's mentioned in DDIA is CAP theorem, which if you've ever worked on a distributed system for more than like, a few weeks, you know it. Even if you don't know the name of it or that it's a "theorem", you just know that data consistency and availability are tradeoffs of one another. At some companies, maybe they have a formula. But at all the companies I went through, it was clear that what they were looking for were not academics and theory, but signals of real world experience. The feedback I got post-interviews confirmed this - interviewers were more impressed that I brought up considerations like personnel expertise (ex: More devs know SQL than NoSQL), time to market, difficulty in hiring a replacement who knows <complex en-vogue message queue>, and security vulnerabilities that multiply at scale than they were at my ability to talk about sharding and partitioning. On "Reverse System Design" I did not see this phrase mentioned even once, anywhere, online or in any videos prior to my interviews. And yet three of my five on-sites had "reverse system design" rounds. This is a really interesting format where the interviewee is asked to come present a system they already had designed or built (If you can't talk about one for confidentiality reasons, in some cases you can also ask for a prompt from them and it becomes a bit of a take-home assignment). I loved this. Best interview format ever. I had built a lot of things, including some fairly complex distributed systems, so I just got to talk about them and diagram them out and tell cool stories. On The Rest of the Interview If you've been following along, you saw few coding interviews, so that leaves system design, and reverse system design and... what else? Well, at a lot of companies we just talked. No bullshit, we talked like actual humans. Not even behavioral, "Tell me about a time when..." style prompts, but a shocking number of interviews were just talking shop for like 45-60 minutes. Really organic, casual conversations going deep on some tech or lobbing questions back and forth at each other about how we'd do X or Y, or what it's like to struggle with Framework Foo. And I will reiterate, all of these were major tech companies. On The Process You can pretty much just take my other expectations from above and reverse them to get the outcomes here: * A fair number of interviews conducted by Senior and mid-level devs. I don't really have a huge problem with this, but the nature of the conversations in these interviews was just very different and I can't see how it would consistently get good signal. Much more in the weeds, more comments about coding idiosyncrasies and nitpicking if doing a live coding session. * "Streamlined" would be a very generous term to apply - scheduling was an absolute nightmare for many of the companies. Constant cancellations and rescheduling, lots of demand for me to align to west coast timezone (Remember, I'm two hours ahead in the midwest, I don't want to interview at 7 PM my time), which I refused to do. People showing up consistently late and trying to keep me long after we went past time, recruiters changing halfway through the process, poor communication and many days between replies, random recruiter phone calls mid-day instead of just sending an email. If you checked the Sankey, you'll see I just dropped two companies before finishing their onsites. I had just had enough. Literally, these companies lost on a Staff-level engineer in quite possibly the highest demand market in history simply because their hiring process was poor. On Offers Honestly, not going to say much here as it's been beaten to death on this subreddit. This market is insane if you are a Staff-level developer. The offers are very high, yes, even if you are fully remote. In the US midwest, I managed to get offers all topping half a million dollars a year, which is far more than I had expected going in (Especially given data on that from sites like Levels is sparse for remote outside the coasts) and well above what I was making. It turned my purpose of "just exploring my market rate" into accepting an offer so high that I could not possibly refuse it. In Closing Whew. I hope someone finds this of some use - real people anecdotes of what it's like right now beyond Senior-level are hard to come by and, as I mentioned, I went into this process with a bunch of assumptions that turned out to be totally wrong, even for major US tech companies. Staff-level is on fire, every company wants them, especially if you have any experience at all operating at the scope and level, and the interviews are far less intimidating than Reddit would have you believe. If you're even considering making a move, now is the time to do it - don't sit with your impostor syndrome like I did.