After 9 years at the same company, I left my job at the beginning of January 2020 to dedicate myself to leetcoding and interview practicing in the hope of getting hired at a FAANG, more specifically Google.
I really started dedicating all my time to interviewing January 1st.
It is now March 31st and I am now abandoning the idea of getting hired at a FAANG, or any larger-sized startup and will target early startups with lower entry bar.
Yesterday I had my “virtual on-site” interview with Google and it went poorly.
The 1st interview was behavioral and I think it went fine, but I’m not sure the interviewer was thrilled.
The 2nd interview was horrible. First, the interviewer had a bad internet connection which made it hard to understand her (I asked her to turn off her video to help, which she did), 2nd she jumped immediately to the problem without introducing herself or anything which made it feel like she was in a rush, 3rd she simply started reciting her problem statement, which was hard to make sense of because of her bad internet connection. I asked her if we could write it down in the shared google doc, so she proceeded to copy/paste a blob of text that seemed to be taken from the _middle of a problem statement_. It had no context and no actual instruction like “write a function that will calculate x and y”. My NDA unfortunately prevents me from sharing the actual thing. Because of this, I did not know what I was supposed to do. I asked her multiple times “so, should I write a function to do this and this?” and she kept reciting the ambiguous problem statement over and over in an impatient and dismissive manner. I felt completely out of place. Then when I finally started making a little bit of progress on guessing what she actually wanted me to do, I started hearing background noise of someone chopping vegetables, and moving things around: extremely distracting. I would ask her specific questions and from her lag in answering and her short 2 words answers I just know she wasn’t paying attention. It took all the strength in me to not tell her how disrespectful it felt to be interviewing with someone that clearly did not want to be here and wasn’t paying attention. At the end of the interview I thanked her a lot, smiled big and swallowed my pride.
I left for our 1 hour break and took a walk to reset my emotions and tell myself that the interview could still go well and that I still had my chances.
The 3rd interview went well. The interviewer had a good connection, a good mic, was understandable, introduced himself and even said “before we start, I want to remind you that if one of your interviews went bad, don’t sweat it, it’s all fine. We’re here to have a conversation. I’m not looking for a right or wrong answer, I just want to see your thought process”. It took him literally 2 minutes to set me up for success. He then proceeded to give me a problem statement, with some context around it, and we started proceeding to _have a real conversation_. I wrote code that, according to my interviewer, compiled correctly and was close to the actual code it was based off of. I left this interview feeling good
4th interview went bad. Interviewer was 10 minutes late and had a bad connection, but aside from that introduced himself correctly, gave me a clear problem statement and although did not talked much at all during the interview, he did give me a few hints here and there. The reason I failed is that I couldn’t solve a simple algorithm and started panicking internally. All on me. I left the interview hoping the next one would go better.
5th (and last) interview went meh. It was a system design interview. I was hoping to be having a conversation with the interviewer but he just was speaking much at all.
I hung up and cried a little. It’s really hard emotionally to accept this.
Before my Google interviewed I got rejected by AirBnB, Twitter told me they don’t think a senior role is adequate and will see if they have “mid-level” roles (which is totally fine, but I’m left wondering if that’s not just a way of rejecting my candidacy), and I cancelled Facebook because what Airbnb taught me is that I’m just not ready. That’s not a lot of interviews you’ll tell me, but I spent _months_ preparing.
Because I know my algorithm and problem solving skills are lesser, I spent hours studying on leetcode, reading an operating systems book, reviewed “cracking the coding interview”, reviewed “introduction to algorithms”, re-read some chapters of “TCP/IP illustrated”, spent hours watching system design videos, hours watching algorithm videos. I spent $5000 on an interviewing/algorithm bootcamp.
I know that I am not a bad engineer. I started programming at 10 years old (I’m 33), taught myself VB, C and C++ (though I haven’t coded in these for many years now). Computers have been my life’s passion. I designed my former’s company infrastructure and made it scalable and resilient. I was a major influencer in my team and my coworkers trusted me. I know I’m a good system administrator; I might be less good a developer but I know how to code well; I know how to influence my coworker into following best practices, reading/writing documentation, being security conscious; I stay informed on the latest trends, I try new technologies, learn new languages, not even out of necessity but because that’s what I love.
But none of this seems to be enough.
And maybe it really isn’t for a company like Google. And maybe I wouldn’t be successful at Google if they hired me.
What I know is that these past 3 months have left me with little confidence about my skills and just wondering if I’m cut out for this. I’m trying hard to not feel defeated, but damn, that hiring bar in FAANG interviews can really make you feel like crap.