Big Tech Q&A and Videos

I'm an earlier-in-career engineer currently working at a quickly growing startup. Things are going well, but I do think I want a Big Tech name on my resume someday.

Right now, Big Tech hiring is frozen, but it will open up again eventually. I'm wondering how can I make sure that I'm prepared when it all opens back up - Should I be regularly studying Leetcode in the meantime or something?

I initially looked out for an opportunity because I was not really satisfied with the role and compensation.

I landed an opportunity in a mature product company

My current org matched the compensation and the role.

Still, with yoe I have and the state of the team and product we are building I feel I deserve much better.

It's been just six months since I joined. I aim for MAANG and that's why I feel unsettled.

Should I just accept the job offers I get offered rather than chasing the jobs offers which don't pay attention to me? I've kind of had this mindset that I should have a nice linkedin profile, and then just work on my craft and participating in the community. I'll apply to the big/medium sized tech companies I wished that I worked for, and if they accept me, great, and if they don't, well I have tons of stuff to do anyways and my current job is fine so it's whatever. Eventually my skills will be so sharp that the cool companies will reply to me, right?

Is this a reasonable approach? Or am I tricking myself here? Should I be more deliberate in my job hunting process even though I'm not really trying to run away from my job?

I'm a fullstack engineer, mostly focused on frontend. On my sparetime, I try to build web apps with the stack that I'm currently familiar with, hoping that they could attract some users. I try to learn about software patterns and tooling that the community recommend, and I try to learn more about cloud infrastructure so I can ship projects (including my own) more easily. Besides this, I participate in my tech community by doing some talks and attending meetups.

I don't dislike my current job, but I feel ready to take on a new challenge. At the same time, I don't know if most people who work in big tech follows a similar recipe that I'm trying to follow. I guess there's no magic formula. I tell friends and family that I'm trying to get into big tech, and I catch myself repeating myself about my plans every time I see them. I graduated university a couple of years ago, so I'm still somewhat new to the industry, but it still makes me question myself if what I'm doing is right, if it's completely wrong, or if I'm just being unpatient.

What should I do? Double down and try to improve my chances of getting replies from the current companies I apply to, or lower my expectations? Or is the answer just based on how much more effort I'm willing to put into it?

I'm an E5 iOS at a Big Tech company reporting to an M2. I'm leading the mobile side for a multi-quarter product project that leverages work from 2 platform teams. Most of the complexity of this project will be on the mobile side. My backend lead is an E6 full-stack web engineer reporting to an M1 who reports to my M2. The M1 is on parental leave until late Dec / early Jan. This E6 has been an amazing partner and teammate.

The 2 platform teams have missed a lot of their timelines. One dependency is about a month behind schedule. They often give us deliverables that are dev-complete and not tested (e.g., compilation errors, etc.). We have sync meetings 2x/week, but 1 platform team has never attended any of these meetings. The other platform team doesn't always send the same engineers to the meeting and doesn't always know the status of their own deliverables. That platform team's EM got terminated for performance reasons before this project started, so their M2 and a TPM have been tag-teaming to fill in the gap. That means sometimes their M2 attends the sync meetings, sometimes the TPM attends, sometimes both attend, and sometimes neither attends. The TPM sends a weather report on that team's deliverables every other week, but hasn't sent one in the past month. In his last email, he listed my E6 and me as the DRIs for their team's deliverables. When I confronted him about it, he said it was a mistake and he'll fix it in future emails. How do I bring visibility into these delays to external stakeholders?

I created a shared Google Doc to track all the dependencies, including when our team needs the deliverables, the other team's ETAs, and any notes. However, it's been challenging getting ETAs from the other teams. When I tagged them in the Google doc asking for ETAs, they just ignore me.

My manager gave me feedback to "influence engineers to hold up their timeline than push for hard commitments". Do you have any concrete advice here? I'm not sure how to do this.

After I escalated the 1st platform team's unresponsiveness to their Director (3 levels up), the E6 iOS DRI became very responsive. Escalating to that E6's skip level had not been effective. Should I just keep escalating everything or is there a better approach?

Here are my Top 3 priorities:

1. Career growth - I want to become a senior/staff engineer as soon as possible.
2. Exciting product space - To have challenging work and growth opportunities.
3. Compensation - If I’m truly achieving the Top 2, this should come naturally.

Here are the options I'm thinking of:

• A medium sized public company like Samsara
• A pre-IPO company (e.g. Airtable)
• A Big Tech company like Meta or Amazon

I found out that I didn't get an offer from one of my dream Big Tech companies. I asked the recruiter for feedback on my onsite performance and how I could have improved and she said this:

You passed the onsite at an L4 but we ultimately decided to go with an internal candidate that the team felt had the relevant business area experience which we had to prioritize at this time. Your candidacy and interview results will remain valid for the next 12 months and if anything else comes up, I'll definitely let you know. 

So she said I passed the onsite, which takes a lot of the sting out of the rejection!

I have 2 questions:

1. Can I trust her? I'd like to believe I passed the onsite, but maybe I didn't. Alternatively, maybe they went with an external candidate who did better than me rather than an internal one.
2. Can/should I still get feedback for improvement? Of my 4 interviews, I know I could have done better on the Data Architecture round. Having their description of what I could have done better is more useful than my general sense that I didn't answer their questions well enough. Is it fine for me to follow up again asking for the hiring committee's notes on my performance and areas of improvement?

Thanks!

I am a mid level engineer from a small startup and have recently secured a senior FAANG engineering position. Given this I am expecting to have some challenges when transitioning both from startup to FAANG and also from a mid level to a senior position.

Given the above my questions are:

• How can I ensure I find a good manager and team during team match to help me succeed? Particularly, what questions should I ask during team match to achieve this?
• Given the quite situational nature and the focus more so on making the transition easier rather than growing, I assume that my focus should be on finding a team with less pressure. Perhaps an internal team?

Would be good to get some thoughts on this.

I currently work in a FAANG company, and I joined in the 3RD quarter of 2023. I am currently a SWE, but I did my masters in AI focusing on planning, reinforcement learning, and imitation learning. (I have 4 yoe relevant to my work and I have a 2 year Ms in AI. I'm currently an L5 engineer )

I need to communicate and reorient my career at my current company.

My manager has asked me initially if I am ok with the team and the product. They also communicated that since our product launch, the team will be in operational mode and hence, it would be good to network and build connections within the company so that I can eventually get into a green field initiative of my choice. Now I have these questions:

• How do I start the conversations for the same?
• What do I need to keep in mind and how do I figure out the details of teams and orgs that are doing what I am interested in?
• Anyone who has done this before, would you mind lending mentorship?

More details on the situation: Initially, I had a couple of conversations about joining at 1 level above, but I did not go through with, it because I knew I would have to do a safe transition and that 1 level above would make it too expensive for me to transition.

Trying to decide about taking an IC role I received in big tech (my first one! Thanks, Alex and Rahul!). I'm very excited about it except that I'm concerned about whether I'd still have the option to be an EM again someday, if I took this offer (I am an EM in a very small company now).

Do you think someone with this resume/background would still have a shot at EM roles? Doesn't need to be FAANG or big tech, but EM roles in at least mid-tier companies.

My resume would look like this, in this order:

• 12 YOE as software engineer and senior software engineer in small non-brand-name companies (no modern tech or working at scale). I did lead some teams of 6-9 people for about two years during this time (some EM jds will count that toward management experience)
• 1.5 YOE as software manager/director managing three then six people in a small non-brand-name company (got role through internal promotion) (little modern tech, no distributed systems or working at scale, not a great management culture in this company, management is very casual, I have a lot of exposure to the overall business, though)
• 1 or more YOE as a senior engineer at a big tech company (first work experience working at scale with distributed systems and modern tech, mentor team members, manage an intern or two if allowed, work on management- and impact-related goals with manager, options for impact in the org)

There are actually lots of EM roles requiring experience with distributed systems, microservices, large-scale consumer-facing products, modern tech, etc. I don't meet the basic requirements for these roles now but would meet them after working as an IC in big tech.

I am a senior software engineer at FAANG (not Meta), and have found myself in a difficult career dilemma.

I joined the company as a junior and made progress to senior in the same team (say A). The nature of the work was very unique. It was heavily focused on technical analysis of software as opposed to writing one yourself. A significant portion of it was cross functional collaboration across different orgs, probably the reason why I was able to get promoted fairly quickly. The coding part was maybe 30% (you were welcome to pursue more if you have the time). The culture overall was nice with good work life balance. Manager mostly supported things I wanted to pursue. Later, I switched teams (say B) and moved to the one with more focus on development of the software. I loved the technology, projects. However, the expectations were crazy high. I ended up getting a low performer rating, a year after I was promoted to senior in my previous team. The side effects were no bonus, refreshers, salary hike.

I have been working hard since then to manage the expectations. However, I have come to the conclusion that it is impossible to exceed them and thereby pursue a career growth and the next title without throwing your life at work. I can get “meets expectation” for foreseeable future. We are also thinking of expanding our family next year.

I discussed with my previous manager who is willing to take me back. The work there has a high visibility, impact for the next year. I could build strong soft skills - leadership, driving things through others, collaboration there; but, not so much as to actually writing software.

My options -

1. Stick through in my current team for few years because it lets me stay closer to software development and open up opportunities in the future for development roles. But that means financial stress, an impact on family goals. Added anxiety.
2. Go back to previous team. Get that job stability, pursue family goals; but, might get rusted on software development skills. Maybe if I find some ways to keep honing them (also software design skills) then maybe there is that.
3. Looking externally. This is my last resort; but, given the market conditions it does not look pretty. I also like my company in general and would hate to leave. Also not sure of the dynamics of going through pregnancy shortly after joining a new company.

What is the correct mindset I should have? How should I navigate this situation in short and long run.

Will interviews for data-related jobs at FAANG companies be different from general software jobs? Given my most recent experience is in software engineering, how can I best prepare for behavioral questions for a data related job?

How do you respond to an email or over a phone conversation from recruiter asking:

1. Recruiter: What leveling would you prefer? L5, L6, etc (This is for Amazon)
   My thoughts: I personally think I'm somewhere in between L5 and L6 (much closer to L6). But I'm not sure what the right response should be.
2. Recruiter: What are your compensation expectations? We have a limited amount of positions open at the moment (but more coming soon.) And we like to know a little more about this from each candidate so we don't waste anyone's time involved, specifically yours :)
   My thoughts: I don't want to give insanely high number to Tier 2/3 since I want to increase my chances of getting interviews. But for FAANG I don't want to give a smaller number either.

Could you please tell how to handle such questions?

I'm an E5 mobile engineer at a Big Tech company. Some engineers have a habit of leaving "drive-by comments" in code reviews that are only tangential to my PR. How should I push back on these?

Examples:

• I created some snapshot tests using our existing 3rd party snapshot library. An engineer commented that we should change where the snapshot library stores the snapshot images. I felt that this was out-of-scope for my PR, so I told them to ask our mobile infra team instead. They did not follow up with the mobile infra team. Should the expectation be for me to drive those conversations with the mobile infra team instead of them?
• An engineer requested that I abstract and mock how I log analytics events for my feature. I think there's little ROI because it's unlikely for that to change, but I did it anyway to appease them. When I later looked at that engineer's PRs, I discovered that they never abstract & mock how they log analytics events either! This seemed hypocritical and a waste of time due to the low ROI.

I was looking in the questions but couldn't find anything about it. There is a ton of info in the internet about bottom-top approach but still can't understand how it works in reallity. Any actual example projects would be great. I read many times that you as Senior/Staff should convince team/teams in an idea/project, and this is one of the ways to get promoted. An example - Staff Engineer created scope for 20+ people and worked on feature X. So my questions there:

• How does it happen?
• Is there any management involved here?

I've always worked for top-bottom companies and even if we have an idea for a feature/improvement, eventually the management decides if we should go for it or not. After all, the management is the one "holding" the budget.

Hey everyone, I’m right now exploring breaking into Big Tech and want to determine if is for me :).

Background:

• BS in CS (2022), 1.5yr SWE at Series B YC startup ($150M)

• Left Jan 2024 for break, explored GovTech/startup ideas

• Pivoted to Big Tech goal (Nov 2024)

• Completed 150+ Leetcode, 26 mock interviews on TryExponent

• Did 5 startup interviews Jan 2025 (rejected) - realized startups need different prep & chose Big Tech.

Along the way, I’ve tried creating interview prep groups but that failed.

Current state:

• Formation TIRA score: 525/1000 (could pass easiest tech interviews at JP Morgan Chase)

• Have referrals at Meta/Stripe/Google/Microsoft

• Got and failed Uber L4 first recruiter screen (7/18/24)

• Solo prep isn't working well& I’m clearly not at a level to pass any Big Tech interview.

My main priorities rn:

• Find a community. Interview prep alone is tough & feels inefficient.

• Have accountability to level up.

• Have real-world challenges (such as mocks interviews with real Big Tech engs)

• Know what to work on.

Spoke with recruiter and offers:

• AI-generated DSA exercises

• Weekly small group interviews (5 people) with industry eng

• Weekly 1:1 mocks with staff eng

• Job recommendations

• Daily manager check-ins

Cost: $5k upfront + up to $15k ISA

Worth it or not:

• Alex said: “So is one of the better interview bootcamps out there. They have results, and the founders are legit. However, their results have definitely dwindled in this market, especially among junior engineers.”
• My current thinking is to do the 7 day free trial and just see how it goes.

Questions:

1. Given the 2025 market, is generally worth it? How about given my situation?
2. Is the cost ($20k total possible) concerning?
3. What Big Tech level should I target? I received a L4 recruiter interview at Uber (7/18/24) and failed the recruiter call so that makes me a bit confused.

I read or saw a video a long time ago that when you negotiate, you want to have competing offers so that you can stack them against each other.

That being said because different sized companies have different pacing for the application process i.e. big tech can take a lot longer whereas startups might move a lot quicker, there are optimal times for when you should apply -- e.g. applying to big tech first and then applying to startups around the time you start entering your FAANG interviews.

Generally speaking, what is the correct timeline for applying to big, medium, and small sized companies?

Thanks

I've grown to be more of a "tech lead"-style E5, which leads to a lot of time spent roadmapping and talking to people instead of actually executing on the project and being more hands-on. My team is heavier on the E3/E4 side, so I'm able to delegate a lot of the coding work away. I was wondering if this was normal for Meta and whether this is an okay way to operate as an E5?

I’ve only worked at startups and non-tech companies, but I’m joining Google next month. How can I make sure that I meet all expectations as an L4? When it comes to talking to my manager, how should I frame the conversation?

• Just ask something generic like “What are my expectations as an L4?”
• Ask for more specifics like how much code to write

I work in AI and am considering working in my next company, Google, Meta/Facebook, and Apple have all called given my reputation in the industry as a past startup founder and well known open source contributor.

What should I think about in joining a company beyond perks and benefits? Should I optimize for learning with an AI legend in their early stage venture that has raised half a billion but hasn’t built or released a product yet, or go for a larger publicly traded company with many layers of management that has established promotion paths and product market fit. What else should I consider before taking a job?

I have always thought like its impossible to get into FAANG companies, and when I got it, I felt also the imposter syndrome.

Now after sometime there, I look back and try to think about reasons that could prevent us from applying, I think mine was just thinking that I will not make it anyway, although now ai know I was mistaken.

What about you. What is your reason?

Which choice is better for long term career growth in FAANG, especially senior to staff?

1. A team of extremely talented engineers (where showing an impact would be very hard)
2. A team of decent talent (but hardworking) where it might be easy to stand out

I know the way I’ve framed the question makes it more like option 2 is better; but, I would love for hear your thoughts.

I'm an E5 mobile engineer at a Big Tech company. Due to lots of manager attrition, I currently report to a hands-off Director with too many reports to have regular 1:1s. I found an awesome EM who agreed to let me join his team and promised me E6-scope projects on his team. My Director is his skip-level, so I'm staying in the same org.

However, before I could make the official team switch, my TPM loaned me to another team lacking mobile resources to meet the TPM's own OKR. He did not bother talking to the awesome EM or me beforehand. My scope on the TPM's project is E5 at most. Now that project is dragging on. It's already code complete, but they want to keep me on that project until it's fully rolled out. We're waiting for mobile adoption to reach a certain threshold before we can do a force upgrade. Due to the code chill around the upcoming holidays, we likely can't do the force upgrade until next year. In the meantime, the project's EM is asking me to investigate pre-existing bugs in their feature. The awesome EM met with the TPM and that project's EM to fast-track my transfer, explaining that he needs me for Q1 planning & our team's own OKRs, but the latter two insisted that I need to support their project until it's completely done, which includes the force upgrade. Am I stuck on this project until January next year or is there a way to switch teams more quickly?

I want to be able to work at FAANGMULA and am considered an industry leader publishing work in my domain, however I am told the culture of Apple, Meta, Google (all of whom which called to hire me) is not open to this (this is all lower level employees whereas most of my friends who are directors of engineering all say I can negotiate this for my next big work and that I can just disclose this an interview and should be fine). Full disclosure: I've never worked at a larger FAANGMULA company (have either founded startups and worked on small teams, consulting etc.).

I am wondering if it is better to place my autonomy over a bigger salary and stability at a larger tech company vs an earlier stage AI startup (maybe not all the perks in the world), but is friendlier to my contributions outside of work (it is directly related) where they don't care and probably encourage that I do publish. How should I think about this in terms of long-term career growth?

I think that there is a chance the startup fails to productionize faster than I would prefer (they're a market leader already at the very top of FAANGMULA developing new foundation models are some of the OG AI people best in class), I wonder if the path I take is better at a FAANGMULA company who can likely compensate for further graduate studies or cover other benefits/perks and higher salary than at the startup, however, it would mean giving up being able to publish and feeling a sense of autonomy.

I don't really know what I want to do in my career. I finished university one year ago, and I work as a full stack engineer right now, and I'm quite interested in ML. I'm more frontend-facing right now, but I see low returns on spending too much time learning new frontend frameworks my entire career. I'm more interested in becoming a well-rounded engineer, so I feel that there would be higher returns on digging down into the backend more. I have been looking at trying to join some big tech company as a backend engineer, but I just went on an interview for a small tech company which does quite alot of ML with the hopes that they were looking for another ML engineer. Instead they presented me with a broad-scoped data engineer role which sounded pretty cool.

My strategy up until this point has just been to find cool roles where I get to learn useful stuff as an engineer from people who are way smarter than me. Sometimes I think "If I would make a startup, would this skill come in handy?" Is that a poor framework? Should I have a plan? I don't even know if I ever want to make a startup lol. I'm interested in joining big tech, but other than that I'm not really sure. I just enjoy building stuff, and I see this as an opportunity of learning data engineering really well (which I don't know very well), but that is perhaps not a wise career choice? Any guidance on how to think as a new grad is appreciated lol.