The last time I contributed to this blog was exactly 7 months ago. There is a reason it has been so long: I changed jobs.
I got stuck
No good can come from putting your old company on blast. Suffice it to say I was not growing anymore and I needed a change.
Once I knew it was time to leave, I needed a plan to get to my next destination.
Prep before the prep
This was the longest job I had ever held. I was extremely out of practice interviewing as the interviewee. As an engineering manager, you have a very unique perspective. You understand how hiring decisions get made. So I knew what my new hiring managers know in terms of what to look for. Since I knew what to look for in someone like myself, my first task was to create a list of companies I wanted to work at and then figure out the hiring process for each of them.
What I looked for
I started by looking at Levels.fyi. On Levels, I wanted to see what similar profiles were getting offered.
I looked at all of their salary data for engineering managers. I filtered on 11-12 years of experience and only selected new hire offers. Finally, I sorted by highest salary. I then applied to the top 10 companies on that list who either hired remotely or hired in my area (Boston).
All in all, including a few companies that reached out to me, my final list looked like this:
- Amazon
- Brex
- Coinbase
- Cruise
- Dropbox
- Instacart
- Netflix
- Physna
- Plaid
- Salesforce
- Stripe
- YUM Brands
Doubling down on prep
Once I had my list of companies, it was time to start learning about their hiring processes. This is where Blind came in. Lots of people reveal what is asked at their companies. They also offer to refer you to their company. If I could do it again, I would have asked for referrals from all of those companies above.
I cannot stress this enough: referrals are the most important part of getting your foot in the door. So much so that the only 7 companies who offered an on-site were companies where I had a referral. Even still, I had referrals at both Google and Salesforce, both of which went nowhere after the initial submission phase.
Based on scouring Blind’s forums, I knew I had to focus on two general areas: systems design and behavioral questions. If I wanted a job at Google or Facebook, I’d have to focus on coding as well.
My study plan
Now that I had a plan of attack, I knew I needed time. After spending way too much time watching YouTube videos on how to prepare, I realized I needed at least 3 months to prepare. Because of this, I didn’t apply to these companies right away. Instead, I knew that the actual interview process, even if it was slow, would still be faster than how long it would take for me to prepare for their interviews.
A major issue in getting started was the lack of information on preparing for engineering manager interviews. The individual interviews were the same for ICs and managers. The differences were in the quantity of each segment. Based on this, I split my time equally between coding, systems design, and behavioral prep. Even though only two of my companies required coding interv
