A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

I skimmed this briefly but I can&#x27;t reiterate enough the importance of practice that the author mentions.<p>I am the same person when a FAANG hired me as I was 15 years prior when I first interviewed there (I also interviewed a bunch of times in between, for successively more senior roles and did better in the process each time.)<p>When I was young, I had some fixed mindset - I am either good enough or not. They will either see that I am good or they won&#x27;t. Nowadays, it&#x27;s obvious to me that it&#x27;s my responsibility to make it <i>easy</i> for them to see that I am good. That&#x27;s what practice is - it&#x27;s you working on your ability to articulate your fit for the role. That could be your ability to solve problems at the whiteboard, honing your career story, etc - the point is that if you ultimately don&#x27;t have something to offer, no amount of practice will help - but if you have the potential but don&#x27;t know how to let it show, you won&#x27;t get the job either.

There is always a lot of bitterness on the topic of FAANG interviews, and also a lot of bashing of engineers working there.<p>It&#x27;s difficult to hire large number of people globally without some level of standardization. What I like with FAANG is that the interview process is fair. The rules are explicit and they give a chance to quite a lot of people (including people with slightly unconventional profile).<p>Another myth is that FAANG engineers are just leetcode grinders and are useless beyond that. What struck me is how diverse the people working there are. In term of educational background, origin, professional experience, age... I find it pretty remarkable. It&#x27;s hard to make any general statement about this population considering how diverse it is.

Man, I&#x27;ve coded a fair amount in my free time, and have even created a couple of money making side-projects, but I just can&#x27;t grind leetcode no matter how often I try. That plus the rejection after doing long on-sites drains me for days afterwards. I&#x27;ve come to the conclusion that even though I may be missing out on those top salaries, FAANG just probably isn&#x27;t for me

OP and founder of interviewing.io here. We spent hundreds of hours interviewing current &amp; former FAANG interviewers to write this piece. We really wanted to peel back the curtain on what happens during these interviews, what actually matters to them, how these companies train their interviewers (if at all), make hiring decisions, and so on.<p>I&#x27;ll be around to answer questions, and I&#x27;ll tag in Kevin, the author, as well (I just edited it).

It is bewildering to me that there are companies where you don&#x27;t interview with the team you will join. What if you don&#x27;t click with them? These are the people you&#x27;ll spend every day working with.

So the main factor for succeeding those so-called interviews is doing more of them? ie, it has nothing to do with your actual performance on the job.<p>We should think hard as a society on what we want to spend our time on. At some point in my career I drank the koolaid that joining a FAANG was the most prestigious thing you could do. But now I start to see people working at FAANGs as bureaucratic rule-follower that put their 50 hours of leetcode-grinding (I suspect that they are implicitly filtering for those engineers that will follow tasks without asking too many questions)

I interviewed at AWS for an application security engineer position years ago, and I was surprised about the questions I was asked.<p>I did the recruiter call, then phone screen, then a series of 4 hour-long interviews. Since it was AppSec, not coding, I expected 3 interviews asking me technical questions about AppSec and a behavioral interview. Instead, all I got 3 hours of behavioral&#x2F;leadership principles questions (With a lot of repeated questions between them), and 1 coding exercise.<p>I got rejected while feeling like I never actually got a chance to show my technical ability to do the job. I know how much they value leadership principles, so I probably wasn&#x27;t going to get the job anyways, but it still made me feel a bit disgruntled.

Tangentially related, is it worth it to do the leetcode grind and all the FAANG-interview preparations if I&#x27;m always planning on working remote? Are there remote companies with FAANG-level compensation that would warrant this sort of interview prep?

My pro-tip if you want one of these jobs and are not great at leetcoding, try to get another role at the company and then transfer over.<p>Apply as a data analyst, theres no leetcoding, you just need to demonstrate sql knowledge and experience working with the business. And faang data analysts are paid as much as many non-faang engineers.<p>Once you are in, you will be working with engineers, just do a good job, and express interest in working on the software team. The bar will be much much lower than an external candidate.<p>I would say 20-25% of engineers at these companies come from a non-traditional route like this.

If what you want is to be hired quickly and get a big paycheck, go with the higher chaos score. They may be easily impressed by simple interviewing tricks, and since the place is clearly disorganized, you can get away with not doing much work.<p>I should feel bad for giving this advice, but fuck these bloated mega-rich companies if they refuse to get their shit together.

Just a heads up to anybody super starry-eyed about fang, I worked 10+ years non-fang, and tried fang, and it was absolutely miserable, one of my least favorite jobs of my career. Yes I made a lot, but I also worked and stressed proportionally more. YMMV.

They buried the important info in the middle of the first page: &quot;Moreover, this guide is written for experienced, back-end leaning engineers – interview processes are usually different for juniors, but we won’t be getting into those differences.&quot; There are multiple jobs out there are very technical positions pay 6 figures with no coding required. It&#x27;s not interviewed for. It&#x27;s not required at work. In fact, I can&#x27;t give code to customers even if I wanted to.<p>Companies operate on more than just code monkeys.

My urge to work for FAANG company is faded away. Being in my late 30s I don;t want to grind leetcode anymore. I had interviews in Apple&#x2F;Google&#x2F;Facebook and I felt luck played a huge part of that. I got some live coding questions that prepared the day before and I aced them and in some cases I practiced so much and couldn;t even write more than 10 lines of code.

I don&#x27;t know, I&#x27;ve walked into these interviews with zero preparation and succeeded.<p>And I&#x27;ve failed FAANG-ish interviews where no amount of leetcode grinding would have helped me.<p>In my opinion, it&#x27;s getting rather silly. They&#x27;re scaring off and filtering out excellent candidates with these excessive processes. None of them even cared about my Github repository that&#x27;s full of code I write for fun.<p>Software developer hiring is definitely ripe for revolution&#x2F;innovation.

I&#x27;ve been an interviewer at Netflix and Amazon and both of these feel pretty spot on in the guide.<p>Not sure if it&#x27;s still this way, but at Netflix the hiring manager was the only decision-maker. They took in all the feedback from the other interviewers and usually went with the majority, but they had the ultimate choice. You could say they had the Freedom to hire anyone they want and the Responsibility to deal with the consequences of that.<p>And yes, at Netflix we pretty much all just made up our interviews as we wanted to, although after I while I zeroed in on questions that would give me the best go&#x2F;no go data and would repeat them often.<p>And at Amazon, what they say here is very accurate -- the bar raiser is the key person to impress. They and the HM have ultimate say on the results.

I&#x27;ve succeeded with interviews looking for three things:<p>* Find a candidate who takes apart with ease a couple of rather rudimentary programming problems. NOTHING crazy. Something practical and easy to understand the purpose of.<p>* Look for passion in technology and coding. Ask them what they would learn or do if they didn&#x27;t have to work for a year.<p>* Look for rapid upward trajectory (potential). Someone doing the same thing for 5 years, meh. Someone going from data entry to automating a gnarly task with Go in a year - give me a ticket on that rocket ship.

I saw a lot of articles about preparing for those interviews. I have yet to see articles about how to get an interview.

sorry this may be a dumb question but I am curious<p>is FANG still hiring? or are they generally in hiring freeze?

I&#x27;m not sure what to think of the whole guide when there is blatantly wrong information about the basics of the interview process for some companies (for example, Amazon does NOT have a team-dependent hiring process)...

Now I just need a guide on how to actually get a FAANG interview

All of the FAANGs are various levels of unethical, or a net negative for society in my estimation. No more interviewing there for me.

Sounds like an FB shill