Programming

A DB engineer contacts me on Teams at 14:50:

-"Hey, could you please restart server X?"

I was just happen to have an open SSH connection to the server, so I slapped "reboot"

-"At around 17:30. Is that okay for you?"

...

My deskphone rings:

USER: Do you know what is up with the phones?

ME: You're calling me right now, I have not heard anything.

USER: No from outside, my wife tried calling in and she couldn't get through and then I tried calling my work phone on my cell phone and it said "Verizon can't complete this call".

ME: That sounds like to me that there is an issue with Verizon.

USER: Oh okay.

They hangup and then I immediately call my desk phone from my Verizon cell phone. It connects.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Got an email from someone today with so many AWS certificate icons in their signature I had to scroll over to the right to see them all. This is ridiculous and in my opinion, only serves to stroke the ego of this person. I get it though, maybe there's a more prestigious handful you'd like to display and that's fine but nobody cares that you passed your introductory certification proving that you know what S3, EC2, and a VPC is...

such a simple stats UI that is so simple when i just think about it in my head:

if press + button, add stat, reset button, count stats, set to 0, set relocatable stats

but when you actually start fleshing things out there are so many things to consider and THINGS CAN GO WRONG SO EASILy

eg. i have a staff that adds various stats, i had a bug where when i press reset, it counts the stats from the staff and now i can re allocate the staff stats to other stats, which is not ideal

THANKS FOR READING this weird diary thing i had to tell someone idk

Background

This is my second time interviewing with Google. The first time I couldn't solve 4/5 questions.

Education: BS

YOE: 1.5 years

Target level: L3

Interviews: 1 screen + 3 coding + 1 googleyness

Interviewers Location: Mountain View

Leetcode questions done: 277 Total (58E 189M 30H)

How I prepared

• Neetcode 150

• Leetcode company questions list

• Mock interviews with friends

• Mock interviews with Google engineer

Results - yes, you can ask recruiter for results

• screen - hire/pass

• coding - 1 strong hire 2 hire

• Googleyness - not a psycho

What I Learned

• L4 is significantly harder than L3. L3 questions are usually L3/L4 level questions with less follow ups and need for attention to details. L4 questions are either L3/L4 level questions with a lot more follow up or need for perfection, or L4/L5 level questions where a lot of them are kinda cracked.

• Googleyness doesn't really matter if your coding rounds were wack, or great. As long as you prepare for the most common behvioral questions, you are fine.

• Strong hire doesn't mean complete perfection. Messed up the time complexity a bit and a small int vs. string conversion bug but still got strong hire.

• Hire doesn't mean need to finish follow ups (at least for L3).

• Communication is how you get hire/strong hires.

• Write code as if it's going into production. Interviewer, hiring manager, and hiring commitees review your code, so treat your code as if it's going into the Google codebase.

• Don't interview too slowly if you don't want to spend three months team matching. The original position I interviewed for was taken and I had to team match for three months.

• Make sure to prepare for each team match. I got lazy and that's why I was rejected by 4 teams.

• Google recruiters are insanely busy... They are talking to a lot of other extremely talented engineers at the same time. Cut them some slack.

Tips

• Know your patterns well. If you see a question similar to one you did before, make sure to nail it for a strong hire

• Definitely revise. Keep an excel sheet of questions you solved and revise the ones you couldn't.

• Have a game plan. This means doing mock, recording yourself doing a question, and come up with a workflow for your interviews.

• Record yourself doing questions out loud. Lot of times you cannot even understand your own gibberish.

• Write comments in your code. It's a green flag to the interviewers (but also not too many comments, remember, we want production code).

• Definitely turn off autocomplete in Leetcode

• Pace yourself, there's most likely a follow up in a 40 min interview (45 min total but last 5 is for questions). Try to finish main question in around 30 min.

If I can do it, you can as well. Good luck! Ask me any questions

1).your years of experience 2).Your tech stack 3). Your salary