Hello Alex hope you're having a good day and thank you for time.

I have two questions please:

- Do you have any recommendations to learn more about best practices for Ad Tech? My career is moving towards this domain.
- For building your SaaS applications do you typically stick to building the backend services in a more flexible / dynamic language like (python or typescript/js) in order to build quickly and then later refactor to a better performing language (go, java, rust) when performance starts to matter? I'm really curious about lessons learned from delivering your product.

Thank you again :)

Mid-Level Software Engineer [E4] at Meta

Kevin Carr

Recruiter screening will be pretty lightweight conversation. They will ask about your resume, what you have been working on and other softball behavioral questions potentially.

After that you can expect this timeline roughly:

**Technical phone screen** (2 questions in 40 minutes. You can expect an easy and medium or two mediums). As a hint, utilize leetcode's more frequently used questions feature if you have leetcode premium.

**Final round interview** (E5 and below)

- 2 coding interviews
- 1 system design interview
- 1 behavior interview

The process can take anywhere between 2 to 3 months. It took me roughly 2.5 months as I wanted to prepare as much as possible. Take your time if you can afford to in order to prepare for the data structures and algorithms and system design questions.

Resources available:

- Taro has a great system design prep resource playlist: <https://www.jointaro.com/playlist/dChIyTQcu2Ct5VC70lki/>
- Leetcode premium has most frequently questions for most companies. If you have more time, focus on learning the patterns. Here is one resource out of many you can use: <https://seanprashad.com/leetcode-patterns/>
- For system design, try reading these books: Designing Data Intensive application by Martin Kleppman, Alex Xu's System design books 1 & 2

Hey here's my two cents. When you are starting your career I would recommended you being proactive with any potential mentors and providing gratitude at every step.

TLDR:

- Schedule a meeting with your mentor.
- Show appreciation and that you followed through with their advice
- Go into every mentoring meeting with a goal. Each meeting you should be asking the most 3 important questions you want answered. Their time is valuable!
- Ask them if they need help on any projects and how you can make their job easier. Reciprocation goes a long way!

Ways you can be proactive and topics you can discuss (more fleshed out version of TLDR):

- Find out about their work schedule and what days are best for them. As SWEs with more experience their time is valuable. Showing a bit more effort will help them know their advice and feedback is having an impact. For example, I would personally be bending backwards to schedule time with a Staff Engineer or Tech Lead to learn more about the team's codebase and improving your technical skills.
- When people give you advice (especially people pressed for time) they like to see you are following through with their advice and what the impact is. For example, maybe your mentor recommends something like "Hey I would recommend you learn more about git to help improve your workflow" or "Hey I would suggest you build a toy project (like a CLI) in Rust because our next big project will be in Rust", tell them you followed their advice and what the impact is. "Hey I build that CLI app in Rust, the language was really fun, but I'm having a little trouble understanding the concept of Ownership. Does this project involve dealing with this project?"
- Also, something as simple as going through your team's code could be a huge win for yourself. "Hey X I read our API code and I'm a little confused why we structure our rate limitter like this?"
- If you are troubleshooting a bug, ask for advice, but before you ask for advice try to figure it out on your own. You don't want your mentor feel like they are holding your hand to solve problems. Instead, by being proactive you show that you respect their time. Example: "Hey X I tried approach 1, 2 and 3 and am still running into issues with our gRPC microservice and latency. Have you encountered this before and how did you approach solving it?"
- "Rising tides lift all ships". If you mentor is giving great advice and helping your career make sure to tell anyone you can, especially your manager, as it can reflect really nicely on them when you mentor goes to performance review.

Also, as a closing thought if you ever get stuck on what to ask don't be afraid to ask on here or on reddit the types of questions you should ask your mentor. Following through on an experienced software engineers' and your teammates' advice can help skyrocket your career :)

Hope this helps and it doesn't sound too ranty! I just learned these lessons the hard way and you have to be the one to take control of your career.