Ask HN: How did you succeed in FAANG interviews as a senior engineer and parent? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How did you succeed in FAANG interviews as a senior engineer and parent?

10 pointslovetocode8 comments

I have an interview with AWS coming up and I was also recently rejected after a Microsoft interview but I can't help but wonder if FAANG is worth it. I have a degree in computer science that took my 12 years to obtain since I started it in the military and bounced between deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan and all the training in between. I have been working as a full-time software engineer for over seven years now which predates me even receiving my degree. It takes me a significant amount of time to prepare for these interviews and fail. I have done take home code assignments for non-FAANG companies that were effectively user stories for their product. It was essentially free labor in my eyes.

Currently I work as a senior engineer and team lead that requires a significant amount of my time. Between 20+ hours of meetings per week, technical mentoring and development tasks it leaves me little time to even eat and relieve myself. I am also a busy parent with two young children who have schedules of their own. I am left with very little time to prepare for these interviews that can last up to four hours. I applied to these companies because I was under the impression that they could be major stepping stones in my career but now I am asking myself if it is even worth it.

I am certain there is someone out there in a similar situation as me that might be able to share their story and provide some sort of inspiration or enlightenment.

Part of me just wants to quit this career entirely because of the interview process alone. I might be having a midlife crisis. I am not sure but I would love to hear the thoughts from our community.

I don't even have kids, but I'm having trouble finding the time for all the interviews and coding tests (and now some people are wanting me to record video of myself also).

Work is really busy right now (and only getting busier, there will be no good time for me to quit here), and I could get away with an scheduled 'appointment' hour here and there, but there's four people wanting to schedule hour long interviews during work hours next week and Amazon is wanting me to complete a 2.5 hour coding assessment on top of that and my boss is denying my requests for days off, so...I don't know what to do.

I know I don't want to work here anymore, but I also don't know how to squeeze in even a handful of interviews without completely tipping my hand to my former boss, and I'd rather not quit before I have a new job in hand (and I also know if I put in my two weeks notice now I'd just be even busier at work with KT but I'm already in the middle of the interview process with several places now).

I hate the tech interview process.

This might not be smart, but I'd be tempted to tell your boss that you're putting in for a couple days off and if they deny it, to consider it your 2 weeks notice. Less aggressive way is to call it a mental health day off. Sounds like a terrible place to work.

Some things are good here (other departments, not ours), but they've basically let our department atrophy without replacing anyone for several years our 'dev team' that used to be 20+ devs and architects is now basically just me and my boss, while they're trying to force massive new projects on us without even shifting people over from other departments to help us out at all (and I know they can do that, they had me help out another department last year).

Only reason I stayed as long as I did was we had no office so there was no chance of being sent back to an office in the middle of a pandemic (and the year before that I was too exhausted preparing for our wedding), and there was just too many uncertainties for me to want to take a chance elsewhere. Also we were kind of slow that year, so work/life balance was pretty good (not anymore). But I'm fully vaccinated now, and it's time to get the hell out of here.

I'm just sticking it out. I have too many home life problems and need the health coverage too much.

I'm not in FAANG, but I agree with your perspective. I don't think FAANG is worth it. Maybe if I was young and single so I could FIRE...

I hate software interviews, even the ones for internal postings at my company. I also have a small child and my wife works (and both have health issues I have to deal with). I often dream about quitting my job. There's never time to do anything fun. I just end up using my vacation to do maintenance/projects and take people to doctor's appointments. I don't even make that much (under $100k). What's the point of having kids and having a job if we don't get the time to do fun stuff with kids and enjoy life?

My schedule is not intense as yours but I do have a 2 year old, who keeps me busy after work. I prepared for couple of hours every night after he went to bed for about 3 months, mostly doing problems on Leetcode. I ended up getting to the onsite rounds to three FAANGs and one offer. I also did some mock interview with help of a friend which helped.

"I applied to these companies because I was under the impression that they could be major stepping stones in my career"

I think that depends on what you think working at at FAANG is going to get you career-wise. Better salary most probably but beyond that who knows? You'll get a lot of recruiter interest but probably won't get any offers just because you worked at a FAANG because, guess what, pretty much every company requires you to go through their kind of assessment these days so you're basically starting over with interviews at other companies if you decide to leave.

One of the reasons to go to faang is higher compensation. Doesn’t it make sense to put in extra hours of work, an investment if you will?

I’ve had some success going to bed early and waking up really early (5am). My minds still fresh, nobody’s awake to bug me and I’m still sharp and motivated. Some people can work at night but that’s definitely not me.

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