Not being able to crack Principal/Staff level interviews and other related thoughts
·2 mins
I got rejected for Principal/Staff level again today, this time at Google. I am just a little drunk and here’s what’s going through my mind right now.
- I should have tried moving out of Amazon right after I got promoted to an SDE3.
- The question for me right now is whether I should stick around or reset my career growth by switching companies or teams.
- Even though my management has begun talking about my promotion and are pretending it may go through in the next year or so, I should keep my hopes in check. (I myself know strong SDEs who are better than me but not getting promoted.)
- There is no point in switching teams inside Amazon because I’ll still be working in the same engineering culture, something that has proven to be a limiting factor in my recent interview experience.
- I used to think my system design skills are excellent but my recent interviews have showed there are significant gaps. I guess the problem is that internal tooling in Amazon is so sophisticated that they don’t require you, as software developers, to think too much. For e.g., you can just offload the problem of distributed rate-limiting to some other team/service. However, that doesn’t help while interviewing with external companies.
- I need to start fixing this right away.
- I’ll regularly start going through YouTube videos, blogs and maybe 1-2 books outside work to do that.
- I was reading an interesting article today - https://danluu.com/learn-what/ - which pitched that you only need to amplify your strengths and go deeper into the things you enjoy and are good at. That got me thinking that I probably wasted a part of my last couple of years learning, or just worrying about not sufficiently learning, Deep Learning. (Wasted may not be the right word but still captures the intent to some extent.) It’s high time - no, really - I stop trying to broaden my domain and become better at the things I already do and enjoy, viz., distributed systems, problem solving etc.
- Rest of the time, I’ll either build things (or think about what to build), learn to speak more effectively or just listen to music.