As a Software Engineer who’s in the weeds with a lot of the new content creators spinning up in the wild, it’s interesting to see their takes on the Software Engineering Interview. Regarded to some the root of all evil and a Leetcoder’s Playground, it’s the gateway between a technically rewarding career with excellence at the forefront and one that is not nearly as lavish.
There seems to be an insane amount of “hype” for the technical interview, with other pieces of content following the same trend: career advice from those with a traditional path to Big N. For one thing, more representation and insights from those who have had or currently have unorthodox career journeys would be more beneficial.
Yes, there are lots of flaws.
Yes, things are changing.
Yes, they are still difficult.
But this post won’t go over any SWE-Style Technical Interviews, namely because I haven’t been in a respected circuit to give enough information about it. There are truly no bounds to the information you can get online about Leetcode style interviews.
I want to talk a bit about interviews pertaining to the following archetypes:
- Infrastructure Engineer
- DevOps Engineer
- Software Engineer, Infra
- Platform Engineer
- Reliability Engineer
The Palantir Circuit that Broke my Heart
I remember it like it was yesterday, unfortunately.
I went through Palantir’s interview process for their Product Reliability Engineer (PRE) role during the Summer of 2022. The way I would describe the responsibilities of the role would be the following: a mix between a typical SRE and a Backend SWE. At the time, I wasn’t as honed in on or familiar with the Infra world, nor did I have a mental model of Software Deployment Management at scale.
As for the actual interview, it was absolutely fantastic.
At that point, I didn’t have much experience with technical interviews at all, let alone with a Big N company. After the 3rd interview, I had to sign an NDA (cool, I know), so that part will unfortunately be redacted.
- Recruiter Screen
- ..self-explanatory
- OA Round / Take-Home
- This was one of the more interesting take-home assignments as the initial online assessment. From what I remember, I had to design a system via a diagram with an attached explanation.
- Technical Screen
- A 45min - 1hr interview scheduled to do a basic, technical screen with another PRE on the team. This was very interesting and different; I was given a problem scenario with a core system that was down. The interviewer would act as an aid to any questions that I would have while I role-play an engineer trying to find the root cause / problem.
I ended up getting to the penultimate round! My energy was through the roof – I fantasized about working there way too much (i blame their really nice merch). It ultimately came down to a culture fit among candidates, in my opinion. And sure, I’ll attribute some of the falloff to my not-so-great-super-day.
Not getting this one hurt bad, it was supposed to be my way out, my golden ticket after college. I regret not doing better, but I don’t regret the shot that I gave. I prepared a ton, as much as I could with what I knew at the time. But this will always be a what-could-have-been situation for me, for now.
Delivery Engineering @ The New York Times
TODO