I’m sitting here sipping on a gin and tonic reflecting on the last 5 months and I really couldn’t feel more fulfilled.
I know a lot of ppl hate nowadays on “tech bro’s” who make grinding leetcode their life for the *chance* of cracking FAANG but the offer from Meta came through this afternoon and I literally cried real tears of relief/joy (not really sure what they were).
It's been a really rough 6 months since going through the breakup with my girlfriend of 4 years and I don’t really have anyone to share this with so sharing it here instead.
To make a long story short - my girlfriend and I met in college at a well known school in Illinois, we graduated together, lived together for 4 years, both got entry (low-paying) jobs around Chicago and after 3 years she decided she’d had enough. Citing my lack of ambition and dissimilar life goals to hers, but I suspect it was more like I wasn’t immediately able to provide the lifestyle she wanted which is fair.
It was after she moved out that I started exploring the possibility of leaving Chicago and trying to get a job in one of the big tech hubs, I was targeting Seattle or the Bay Area. I reached out to some of my friends from college, one at Amazon and one at Meta and managed to get referrals and then initial calls at both companies. That’s when I seriously locked in. I couldn’t stand being in this empty apartment that I could no longer afford and really needed one of these 2 to work out.
My job is 3 days a week in the office and on those 2 remote days for the last 6 months (as well as weekends) I basically did nothing other than interview prep. 5+ leetcode questions, scouring these subreddits as well as blind basically every day looking for insight into the interview processes, and watching every mock system design interview I could find on youtube.
My leetcode profile shows 350 questions solved which is nothing compared to some ppl on this sub but I really took the time with each one to understand it deeply and really emphasized the patterns underlying each one so that I could quickly identify the DS/A needed for a given question. Every question I did I was imagining I was sitting in front of an interviewer explaining my thoughts to them and managed to find some ppl in a discord to do mocks with.
For system design I followed a learning roadmap similar to neetcode roadmap but for system design (shout out to the EasyTree at easyclimb.tech/learning) and basically just watched a bunch of system design interviews on youtube. Didn’t really do any mocks but I was interviewing for mid level at both companies so I wasn’t too worried about blowing anyone out of the water. I just needed to make sure there were no gaps and that I didn't say anything stupid and could explain tradeoffs in design decisions.
The phone screen came around at Meta and I was asked basic calculator and one question I had never seen before, I honestly don't even remember the details of it because my heart was racing and my world was spinning due to nervousness (I think it was a take on “number of stickers” but a variation that made it into more like a medium). I managed to come up with the optimal solution for the first and something resembling an optimal solution for the second and got the call back a little over a week later that they wanted to schedule the onsite.
At this point I hadn’t heard back from the Amazon recruiter after their screen so I was full steam ahead ripping through Meta tagged, dialing in behavioral and consuming more system design content.
The onsite came fast. Four rounds. Two coding, one system design, and one behavioral. The first coding round went great (classic graph traversal, thank God). The second was rougher, a tree problem that required a twist at the end, and I barely got there in time. The system design went better than expected. I walked through designing a messaging app with read receipts and offline sync, leaned hard on consistency vs availability tradeoffs, and tried to keep it high level without overengineering anything.
The behavioral was actually the easiest, not because I’m some incredible communicator but because I had actually lived the stories I was telling. I had prepared some solid stories that were all real and relatable I think.
A week later, I got the call. We’re moving forward. Base + bonus + stock around $295k TC. I sat in my car for like 20 minutes after that call just staring at the steering wheel. It didn’t even feel real.
So yeah. My apartment’s still kinda empty/lonely but today I got the Meta offer letter and for the first time in a long time, I feel things are breaking my way.
TL;DR
Offer $295k TC (e4)
Coding resources: Neetcode roadmap ()
System design resources: EasyClimb roadmap ()
Discord where I did the mocks -
