I took notes over the last 3 years as I was promoted up to Staff Engineer. Here’s what I learned. — A few years ago I made the jump from the midwest to a FAANG company in Silicon Valley. I wrote about getting offers at Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google, and LinkedIn. I also wrote about my negotiations with them. Since then, I’ve dreamt about writing about a successful transition to Silicon…

A contemporaneous account of my 2018 interview gauntlet — The Night Before The weekend has come to a close. It was a good one. A friend and I Lyfted up to downtown San Francisco and we walked eight or so miles, stopping by the Twitter HQ and the Airbnb HQ before walking down to Fisherman’s Wharf. We walked around the water for…

A contemporaneous account of my 2018 interview gauntlet — The Morning Of I was out like a light before 9pm last night and my alarm woke me up this morning at 5:15am, so this is probably the most well-rested I’ll be for an interview thus far. Nerves are creeping back into my system, probably because Facebook has been somewhat of a dream…

A contemporaneous account of my 2018 interview gauntlet — The Morning Of Day 5 is upon me! First, I have to switch to my third hotel of the trip (and it’s not even the last) and hope they let me check-in early. It’s a 20 minute drive from here, so I suppose I’ll grab some coffee, maybe breakfast, and Lyft over there…

A contemporaneous account of my 2018 interview gauntlet — The Morning Of I think I’m largely out of nerves to worry about. I still feel a little bit of nervousness because I’m going to spend 4–5 hours with engineers trying to find out where my ability ends, and it’s never fun to reach the point where you realize you’re out of knowledge…

A contemporaneous account of my 2018 interview gauntlet — The Morning Of I’ll keep my preamble for today short. I slept decent (in that I slept at all), my interview jitters are largely gone (though not completely), and I’m feeling good headed into today. It was hard to gauge where I stood in the world — was all of my confidence unfounded…

A contemporaneous account of my 2018 interview gauntlet. You can find Part 0 here. — The Morning Of I didn’t really sleep last night. I didn’t sleep particularly poorly, but I woke up hourly and checked the clock to make sure I hadn’t overslept, despite it being more or less pitch-black outside. I decided to pass some time waiting for the continental breakfast to open up by looking…

A contemporaneous account of my 2018 interview gauntlet, a six-weekday stretch in which I interviewed at LinkedIn, Yelp, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google — I used to blog on another, pseudonym-less Medium account. I’ve had these diary-esque entries saved in my drafts for the last two and a half years and I thought they might be interesting to folks that have interviews ahead of them. I’ll post these weekly (or something). …

After spending the previous six years of my life in a tiny town for college and a Midwestern city for work, I moved to take a Software Engineering job at a large Bay Area tech company. Here are my takeaways, one year in. — I’m not entirely sure what I expected moving here. I’m not sure I expected much of anything, truth be told. The questions that swirled around in my head for so many years were less “what’s it like to work at a big tech company?” and more along the lines of…