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Comment by VirusNewbie | Hacker News Reader

>My first thought is to cram leetcode for a while but are there any better resources out there? And/or other general advice.

If you're going for staff/principal/senior engineer at Big Tech, this is necessary. (Though I don't think you'll get principal engineer interviews, maybe not even staff unless you have some really notable technical accomplishments other than just being a CTO).

However if you want to work at later stage startups you may not need much practice either.

Finally, you're going for Engineering Manager, I think you shouldn't need to do leetcode. I think most FAANGs etc are going to ask for code reviewing interviews or the like, not have you actually doing algorithmic puzzles.

You do want to practice system design interviews, depending on your skill set, you might be fine and just want to get used to the interviewing process, or you might need to study up quite a bit.

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> Though I don't think you'll get principal engineer interviews, maybe not even staff unless you have some really notable technical accomplishments other than just being a CTO

You may be right.

The companies I was CXO of created some pretty impressive intellectual property (deep tech; which I coded the v1.0+ for personally) and two books (major tech publisher not self-published). You're probably running code I wrote on your machine if you are on a Mac or Linux. Can't say much more without doxing my throw away account.

But I'm not sure any of those things would come across well on a resume, unfortunately.

> Finally, you're going for Engineering Manager, I think you shouldn't need to do leetcode. I think most FAANGs etc are going to ask for code reviewing interviews or the like, not have you actually doing algorithmic puzzles.

Interesting, I've heard that opposite. Good feedback.

> You do want to practice system design interviews.

Good idea. What do you think the best way to go about that is?

>The companies I was CXO of created some pretty impressive intellectual property (deep tech; which I coded the v1.0+ for personally) and two books (major tech publisher not self-published).

Ah. My mistake, I'd guess that is likely to get staff+ level interviews at Big Tech.

>Interesting, I've heard that opposite. Good feedback.

That managers have to do DS&A coding rounds at FAANG+? Maybe some, I don't think the bar will be near as high as the IC route.

>Good idea. What do you think the best way to go about that is?

Well, I don't think this is something you can fake, but if you've been working on deep tech, you don't have to fake it.

I'd go against the grain of reading 'system design books' and say instead read (some of) the actual code and design docs for large popular web scale open source projects (stuff like K8s, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, memcache, Spark etc).

That should be enough to get a deeper understanding of how to design large scale systems.

Then do a few practice interviews at some place like pramp.com or interviewing.io, just to get used to talking about it with someone.

> That should be enough to get a deeper understanding of how to design large scale systems.

Both my startups actually hit scale so I already know system design pretty well. I was actually an early adopter for K8s and we were using Docker before it was even GA. What I don't know is how to interview for it, since a down side of working at a startup is you have very few sounding boards to catch up with terms of art. The priority is on shipping. I'll check out those sites you mentioned. Thanks!

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