u/SnooWoofers5193

yo who else on this train from Roanoke to NYC

1. delayed 6 hours. Presumably because of the heat, track repairs, and last nights NYC to Roanoke train being 8 hours late. Also were delayed by ”wire repairs”. Anything and everything that could happen is happening lmaoo
2. now another train got hit by debris and powered down for 40 minutes on the track, so now our train is doing a rescue operation right outside of Philly
3. train is over capacity with passengers from both trains, standing room only

i feel for the folks that got on at DC, it’s been like a 8 hour journey. This is absolutely nuts!

I’m hoping to continue the discussion on this helpful, but locked, thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1gz9ksj/my_senior_engineer_interview_experiences/

TLDR competitive jobs are competitive to get into … lol

I have 7 YOE and have worked at 2 of the FAANGs, trying to get into one of the MANGOs or whatever the acronym is now. Unfortunately, I just blew a few interviews for top companies like Anthropic and Databricks. I’m feeling kinda bummed, but I was hoping starting up some conversation here and hearing other people’s lessons learned and struggles might help build some understanding.

The context of this thread is based on companies that pay over 300-400k, that ask Leetcode style interview questions and have tough multi round onsite format interview processes.

Some observations I’ve made in my experience:

1. It would appear that in an AI world, there’s tens of thousands of laid off people looking for jobs, and thousands of people that’re using AI to cheat. The bar to pass a phone screen now is you have to pass 100% of every part, including “optional”, of the interview, or you fail. I don’t know. I haven’t interviewed in over 5 years so maybe it’s just how this always has been. For some questions, I really thought what I put forwards was solid, but it hasn’t been good enough.
2. For top companies paying > 500k, you need to get almost perfect on every question to proceed. It is naive to believe “we just want to hear how you think”. Close is not good enough, failing a test case or not being able to solve an edge case fails the entire interview. It’s that black or white: your code must be fully runnable and the output must be correct. There is ZERO room for error.
3. Job listings sometimes just aren’t real or the recruiter is backlogged with too many applications to ever get back to you, even with referral. I’ve seen the same jobs on a career website for like 6 months now. Referrals can help get the interview. Even then sometimes they just interview you just to hang out, but there never was a position that was open or a good fit for your resume. Perhaps this to show people that they are doing well financially.
4. AI infra has been hiring like crazy. Senior engineering roles are very specialized and it’s not *that common that companies will be looking for generalist product / backend roles. I’ve also heard that a lot of companies are looking more towards graduating their intern classes to do the simple product work, and look to industry for very specialized SMEs to solve the real, hard problems. This makes me regret spending the past few years working in the product space and wish I stuck to solving tough backend problems at scale.

I’m hoping I can stay hopeful that I’m gonna land something. I don’t even know what skills I have left to tell people anymore. 70% of my job in my current gig in big tech was about communicating wins to director level leads, driving alignment with XFN, and scoping out projects to help our team hit our goal. All of this is done with strong product intuition but that seems to be very cheap nowadays in applying to other companies. They want to see you be able to scale up AI infra or build native apps, but in big tech as a product eng, a lot of these skills are abstracted from you into very simple building blocks so you just focus on driving impact and alignment.

Hopefully this is some reasonable discussion. I don’t think I’m fully concise or on the noise with these ramblings but there’s an idea in there somewhere. Would love to hear some success stories or coping strategies in the job search journey.