I was laid off from my previous company (not amazon) in February 2024. After 5 months, I was able to land 2 Senior and 3+ Staff Offers. This post aims to document my layoff experience. I'll be monitoring the comments sections to provide insights to any interesting /useful questions. To prevent Doxing myself I will be fudging numbers and presenting pre-negotiation TC numbers. == DMs== I won't answer individual questions in dms b/c I prefer to only share answers I'm comfortable with in the comments section for max reach and transparency. I'm considering setting up some coaching sessions while I'm enjoying my (f)unemployment time between jobs, if your interested in this service, dm me. == My Work Experience == SEA, ~10 YOE. First ~8 at Amazon, then ~2 years at well known, small, non-fang public tech company (~550 - 590 TC depending on swingy stock price). My "Staff" title at the time mapped to ~L5.5, a higher senior / lower staff role, similar to Microsoft 64 maps on Levels.fyi. Since I was exceeding expectations at my role, my goal was to interview up to a clear L6 role to avoid losing career momentum. I have very little interviewing experience, so to achieve this I invested a lot of time developing strong System Design interviewing skills and polishing my behavioral stories to meet the Staff Bar. == Interview Stats == 3 Mock System Design Interviews 30 Applications 8 Never heard back 3 Resume / Recruiter Call Failures 2 Phonescreen Failures / Ghosts 4 Onsite Failures - I straight up failed first 4 onsites, progressively getting better. Last onsite I was borderline fail. 5 Onsite Passed - Got 2 Senior and 3 Staff Offers 1 Onsite Pending - Finished one onsite, HC is being slow. I have 70% confidence it will be a pass at Staff level 7 Onsite Skipped - After getting some strong initial staff offers, I started canceling onsites. == Interview Plan == Overall I spent about 2 months preparing and 3 months of pre / interviewing. In more detail, the way I balanced my schedule was: 1 month - LC prep focus, applying for phonescreens near the end 1 month - System Design Prep while doing LC Phone screens with some mock System Design interviews at the end 3 months Interviewing - Further polishing System Design and LeetCode by working through more advanced materials == Onsite Company List == List of companies I had the opportunity to onsite at for staff roles: Oracle, Roblox, Meta, OpenAI, NextDoor, Coupang, StubHub, Snap, Uber, DataDog, Figma, Robinhood, Remittly, Snowflake, Amazon, Airbnb Hardest Onsite: Oracle. Oracle asked very hard LC questions. 1 DP, 1 hard hacker rank scheduling problem Easiest Onsite: Meta. No onsite is truly "easy", but I think Meta had the easiest loop because it is the most gamefiable. For instance: 1) The LC is the most gameable 2) System Design questions didn't require as much "leading" 3) No Deep Dive section and behavioral section felt easier than average == Staff Offers == In no particular order: 1) Figma: 560k TC: 260k Salary + 1.2M Stock / 4: I was able to get higher TC post negotiation, but any information here will dox me because of how small Figma is. 2) Meta: ~610k TC: Pre-negotiation with no breakdown provided because I never made it through team match 3)OpenAI: ~"900k TC": 300k salary + ~600k PPU per year I decided to go with Figma because of the team I matched with and the company gave me the best vibe during the interview process. Meta might be tempting with the right team and compensation, but team matching is really backed up so it is hard to get an interesting team. Meta also is known to be very stressful so I wasn't as keen to consider that. OpenAI was out of the picture because originally I was interviewing for a remote role, but the role got filled and the offer became SFO only and I didn't want to relocate. Also, PPUs sounded complex and the 996 culture is not appealing to me. == Final Thought == I've commented individually on a few threads about my experience and got some thanks. I hope this thread shows: 1) A realistic snapshot of what the job market is like for an ~10 YOE candidate 2) Encourages people to work through the grind when making a big career change. After failing 4 onsite interviews in a row, and getting my first Senior offer, I was very anxious, stressed and seriously considering taking an ~350TC Senior role. I'm so glad I persevered, finding new study resources and setting new goals to get a Staff role at a company and team I'm fired up to join. I hope others can be inspired to make it to their own dream role, and I want to help others through their journey as well #layoff #severance #interview == Edit 7/3 == Been getting a lot of DMs, wanted to let people know I'm going to be off blind till 7/9 since I have holiday weekend plans. The most popular request has been resume reviews. For starters I recommend looking at this resume which has a similar format and writing style to mine: https://levelup.gitconnected.com/the-resume-that-got-a-software-engineer-a-300-000-job-at-google-8c5a1ecff40f If you want more personalized advice, you can DM me for a review session or ask more specific questions in the thread and I'll get to it on 7/9
Congratulations! Whatโs the deal with OpenAI PPUs? How different/hard were OpenAI interviews compared to others?
Felt easier compared to others IMO. Coding round is practical so doesn't need much LC practice. Interviewers explicitly state they care about functionality and not Big O. The interview does requires a lot of lines of code so you should practice coding fast with minimal bugs in a coderpad like environment. System designs were simpler. Either low level of had few features. I finished my first system design in the phonescreen round super early and got highest marks. Was trying to make up scope to fill the time. Second design was lower level so had more deep dive.
Oh as for the PPUs, I'm not an expert, and didn't talk much with recruiter but here are the things I didn't like: Vesting schedule: Can't sell for first 2 years. And must wait like 6 months after vest before you can sell equity in any company "liquidity event". Unclear value: Not much data on blind what PPU offerings are like historically and how much value earned PPUs are also not as standard of a private compensation unit so the regulation is less standard. There was an article recently which insinuated OpenAI was trying to claw back PPUs from ex-employees which isn't cool.....
Thank you for the post! It's a beacon of hope for folks like me who have been consistently failing onsites (failed 3 screens and 5 onsites so far). I'm a Staff with 10yoe, but at this point considering taking any role. Do you mind sharing your mindset going into an interview, specifically system design and behavioral interviews?
Thanks for the comment. I wrote this post for people like me and it means a lot it is resonating with you. Going into your question, pre going into the interview their are 2 things I recommend 1) I highly recommend mocks. Mocks reduce help get the nerves ironed out along with highly detailed feedback. In turn, this reduces failure rates which reduce the fatigue of failed interviews. 2) For both System design and Behavioral build your own answer keys for popular questions prior to interview. Build the answer key sections based on how you plan to deliver the content so you can review over time with minimal cognitive load Going into the System Design interview I did a couple exercises to warm me up (not necessarily for each interview). 1) I reviewed my personal interview answer key summaries i.e. Functional requirements, non functional requirements and HLD. 2) Listen to 1 random system design video in my system design mock playlist 3) Self whiteboard one of my answer key questions For Behavior I just review my answer keys for top projects over the years.
One other point I want to highlight (might edit main post) is I had similar tough failures in 2022 when I applied to my last company. I think I failed 5 onsites, and passed my 6th to get a ~470TC offer that doubled my income at Amazon + half promotion. During that time I also had many more failed phonescreens. But my prior phone screen prep really helped me onboard quicker this time and I only failed 1 LC based phonescreen this year. Its a grind, but there is hope at the end of the tunnel!
How did you study? Prepared for interviews?
Congratulations ๐พ๐. Do you mind sharing your new study source? That would be helpful to job seekers like myself. Thank you
A quick summary of useful study resources. Might do another post if this becomes a hot question Coding: Grind 75. Neetcode 150 looks useful but I didn't use it. System Design: System Design Fight Club (SDFC) tier list is ๐ฅ: https://github.com/systemdesignfightclub/SDFC?tab=readme-ov-file#roadmap--useful-resources I wouldn't recommend blindly following their roadmap or youtube videos though. There are better resources
OP - this is one for the most important questions, would really appreciate if you could do a post on this ๐๐ป๐๐ป๐
How did you manage to keep moral high after 4 rejections
Great question! A couple things helped: 1) My initial 6 onsite interviews I scheduled at companies I didn't care about. Knowing they were practice ahead of time helped lower the blow, but not take it away completely. TBH the Senior offers hurt the most b/c it made me scared I wouldn't be able to get a Staff Offer when I start transitioning to the companies I want. 2) My 7th onsite was at Meta, and my failures fired me up to double down as I study HARD for meta. I grinded 1-2 weeks through more system design case studies, whiteboarding HLDs, deep dives e.t.c. Once I passed Meta, I felt a huge relief.
Congratulations on getting these awesome offers. Kudos to your patience. Appreciate you sharing this information and helping others like me
Great post, thanks for sharing. For meta for the 4 rounds what were the scores to pass?
What do you mean by scores? I didn't ask for much feedback on my rounds since I passed.
I heard Meta uses strong hire/lean hire/no hire etc for each round, would be interesting to know details on how they make decision as they're one of largest companies hiring in current market
Do you feel interviewing helps you become stronger at staff level?
Yes, especially for system design. It forced me to polish my communication skills as well as my reasoning skills. I also invested time to learning key technologies better like: Redis, Kafka, ElasticSearch, DynamoDB, AWS Cloudfront e.t.c
Good questions. I think most were medium LC. In 2022 I felt like I got medium LC in coding phonescreen and harder questions on onsite. This time I feel like onsite questions were similar difficulty to phonescreen. Rough breakdown: ~14 Coding Phone screens 5 relied on "practical" questions - Either a real word like question or a LC medium with extra data transformation steps that are more real world like. 4 LC Hards ~6 Medium / Easies. 1 DP question overall, Oracle onsite ๐
Follow up - do you think the paid mocks at prepfully or interviewing.io worth it?
How did you get all these interviews? Applied online?
I applied at company websites directly. I had a fairly optimized resume layout from 2022 so I spent time optimizing my 2022-2024 experience. My resume screen pass rate was high enough that I didn't bother further optimizing.
What do you do to optimize? I don't get interviews
Congrats! Are you based out of WA?
Yup, Figma has an office in SEA and is remote friendly which was a helpful contributor to my choice :)
is figma fully remote??