Journey to FAANG - Interview Tips and Strategies on Sandeep Gangarapu

Behavioral prep

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 00:00:00 -0600

💡 The key idea for this interview is to guage what kind of a person, teammate you will be and what experiences you had. This is the best time to showcase your strengths and show that you are aware of your weaknesses and are working on them.

I feel this is more of a damage control round in the sense that you need not impress them with your stories and answers as much as you need to make sure you don’t bomb this or say things that turn them off (eg. I have no weaknesses. I am perfect)

Case study prep

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 00:00:00 -0600

💡 Think of case study as some problem that you would arrive at your own company and solve it like you would solve that rather than looking at it as an interview question. This helps me a lot.

https://datainterview.com/ is one of the best sources for preparation.

Structure

Structure in answering a case in very important. Ask why we want to do what we want to do. Ask clarification questions. Narrow the scope of the answer. Take time to think. State your assumptions. Work with the interviewer to get to the answer.

Rubric

The interviewers evaluate your answer with a rubric. Whether the answer is right is just one point a rubric. Most people just focus on getting to the answer and forget that the evaluation is on a lot of other aspects.
Some common rubrics.
1. Did they ask clarification questions
2. Did they scope the problem well
3. Did they structure the problem well
4. Did they arrive at a solution
5. Is their solution technically sound
6. Did they communicate what they want to do well
7. Did they work with interviewer (take the hint) to arrive at a solution.

Business sense

Always understand what the underlying business is. What is the mission of the company and what do they care about. What is their business model
Always state this and discuss with your interviewer why we should care about doing what we are doing.
It helps interviewers assess that you are not just solving the problem, but you understand the top level view.

Mock

As always, the best way to improve upon this is get some professional mock interviews.
They are very effective at evaluating you on a rubric and help you understand your weaknesses.
https://datainterview.com/ is a great place for this.

Best way to reach me is via Twitter or LinkedIn DM’s

Getting referrals

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 00:00:00 -0600

💡 I did not get a single call from a recruiter when I applied directly on the portal. All my calls are a direct product of a referral except one.

Get Linkedin Premium. Its worth it.

A lot of referrals are from connections I made at random places at random times. So its always a good thing to build your professional network even if you are not hunting for a job.

MODE SQL Notes

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 00:00:00 -0600

Comparison operators
- LIKE is case sensitive
- ILIKE is not
- BETWEEN includes the range bounds
- IS NULL is for missing values. column=NULL will not work.
- For non null values - use IS NOT NULL. Don’t use NOT IS NULL
Aggregate function
- COUNT
  - COUNT(col) gives of count of col where values are not null.
  - This is the main difference between COUNT(*) and COUNT(col)
- SUM, AVG and COUNT can only be used for numeric values. (duh!)
- AVG ignores null values completely. Does not take in the denominator
- MIN and MAX can be used for numeric, date, chars
GROUP BY

Offer negotiations and Timing

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 00:00:00 -0600

💡 Companies are NOT doing you a favor by offering you a job. Its an open market and market decides the price.

I don’t have anything new to say hear. everything is covered in detail in the blogs below. These blogs are gold.

https://haseebq.com/my-ten-rules-for-negotiating-a-job-offer/

https://haseebq.com/how-not-to-bomb-your-offer-negotiation/

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

https://scarlet-chen.medium.com/my-journey-from-econ-phd-to-tech-part-3-negotiations-part-1-ead9d72d4157

A recruiter view of offers and negotiations

https://www.teamblind.com/post/kind-of-new-recruiter-ama-a31aHx3q

But I will cover things that were hard for me to internalize.

Will they recede the offer if you ask them for more compensation?

Resume and cover letter prep

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 00:00:00 -0600

A great resume will give you a shot at convincing the recruiter to move you forward. It also gets you through any automated system the company is using to filter resumes.

A great resume will

Be relevant to the job you are applying (personalize).
Project your strengths without explicitly saying them.
Be very tight. Every section, every sentence, every word needs a reason to be there.
Always be accompanied by a cover letter.
1. cannot overstate the importance of a cover letter.

Resume is relevant to the job you are applying (personalize).

Prioritize projects so it highlights what the job description says.
Include any relevant projects where you remotely used the tools the job description talks about.
Screening software and some recruiters see if the keywords in the job description matches the keywords in the resume.

Resume projects your strengths without explicitly saying it.

I took Clifton strength assessment to understand what my strengths are and found a way to showcase them through what I did in the project sections without explicitly saying it.
You can take yours here. https://store.gallup.com/p/en-us/10108/top-5-cliftonstrengths
It is $19 and is totally worth it. The assessment not only gives you a path to crafting your resume, but it also gives you language to describe yourself, talk about your strengths and weaknesses.

Resume is very tight.

Every section, every sentence, every word needs a reason to be there.

Technical prep

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 00:00:00 -0600

💡 Pay for the premium version of interview prep websites like LeetCode. $30 a month subscription is totally worth it compared to the returns.

Data Science interviews test many technical skills depending on the role or the level.

Algorithmic Coding Prep

This is probably the most important component for software engineering roles, but not so much for data scientists. If you are interested in roles like Research Scientist, Research Data Scientist, then this will become important.