Sorry to hear about your situation. I've interviewed quite a lot to the point where I was doing few every year for practice. One thing I can share for sure is that preparation in isolation will not be nearly as good as the one with some feedback. You can try doing mocks with friends etc and that would be very helpful. However, 6 months for interview preparation is quite high, coming as SDE3 from Amazon you probably will be interview ready in anywhere from 2 to 5 weeks.

Now I fully understand if you want to take a break and start interviewing after 6 months. But that is different than preparing for 6 months. But if you don't want to take any break probably keep applying for jobs while continuing preparation.

Senior Software Engineer [E5] at Meta

Tarun Mall

I am not sure how the company culture is at DoorDash but my answer will be slightly different from Alex's. I think you are paying too much attention to the level of people. It is very common to run into a problem where others cannot propose any solution. Since you came up with the initial proposal you are the best person to identify any better alternatives.

In your situation, I would've tried to reach out to my teammates or some internal Q&A forum or may have re-read some more documentation to find the solution. Irrespective of what level the person providing the solution is I would've treated and looked at the solution the same way the first reviewer looked at yours. And eventually would've tried to come to the solution with the help of others.

Hope you don't take my suggestion the wrong way, what I am trying to say is instead of trying to tie people's opinions to their level try to understand everyone's point of view. That'll give you an opportunity to have good relations with everyone. Just having a good relationship with an E7 will limit you in a lot of ways, you ideally should've good relationships with E6's and E7's and E5/4/3s.

Also, one more tip, don't treat others as someone who can provide solutions right away. Most of us don't know the solution to like 99% of the stuff. Try to treat them as a sounding board of ideas. Come up with a couple of talking points and brainstorm with them. That way you'll leverage their experience and can come to a solution to which both of you will agree.

I don't think it is insensitive. But companies that usually do layoffs end up going into a hiring freeze. Once they come out of the hiring freeze they try to be careful and attempt to fill open headcounts by allowing people to move across teams.

However based on your level that company might still be hiring, so I wouldn't call it insensitive and there is nothing wrong to be prepared for the time they'll start hiring.