/Interview Advice

How To Sabotage Your Salary Negotiations Efforts Before You Even Start

- Aline Lerner tl;dr: Common mistakes people make during salary negotiations, focusing on two key errors: revealing information too early and negotiating before being ready. Aline emphasizes that recruiters are not your friends; they work for the company and are incentivized differently. Revealing information like your current salary, expectations, or other job interviews can be used against you. The article advises being in "passive information gathering" mode during interactions with recruiters. It also stresses the importance of timing in negotiations. “Only when you have all the necessary information should you begin to negotiate.”

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Back Of The Envelope

tl;dr: “The back of the envelope calculation is commonly used to evaluate different architectural designs. Although the optimal design depends on the system requirements, the back of the envelope calculation provides an opportunity to compare different architectural designs without prototyping.”

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Real Time Presence Platform System Design

tl;dr: “In layman’s terms, the presence status shows whether a particular user is currently online or offline. The presence status is popular on real-time messaging applications and social networking platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Slack. The presence status represents the availability of the user for communication on a chat application or a social network.”

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System Design Interview Cheat Sheet

tl;dr: “The system design questions are subjective. This cheat sheet is a work in progress and is written based on my research on the topic.” Topics include databases, API design, capacity planning, high level design, design deep dives, and more.

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I Failed 3 Job Applications, Here's What I Learned

- Alex Ewerlöf tl;dr: “Today after 23 years, I have a relatively high level leadership position but it wasn’t always like this. As an introvert in a world that’s optimized for extroverts I had a long and painful learning curve.” Alex provides us with tips he's learned and mistakes he's made applying for jobs at Datadog, Spotify and Shopify.

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How To Approach A System Design Interview

tl;dr: This article covers: (1) The difference between engineering problems and design problems. (2) How approaching a system design interview is different to a coding interview. (3) What it’s like to walk into a system design interview. (4) What your interviewer looks for, and what they don’t. (5) Green Flags, Red Flags, and other signposts.

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The Really Important Job Interview Questions Engineers Should Ask (But Don't)

- James Hawkins tl;dr: "It's normal for candidates not to ask harder questions about our company, so they usually miss out on a chance to (1) de-risk our company's performance and (2) increase the chances they'll like working here." James gives several examples of interview questions candidates can ask about product-market fit, financial runway and more.

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How To Estimate Disk Space

- Will Larson tl;dr: Will recalls one the best architecture interviews he's been in, "where the candidate was able to significantly narrow down the possible solutions by asking for a few details: queries per second, expected number of rows, and necessary columns." Will demonstrates how he would approach this question. 

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STAR Method For Interview Questions

- Will Larson tl;dr: Will offers the STAR template as a framework to respond to interview questions e.g. "Tell me about a time when you had to change your organizational structure to solve an important problem?” STAR: (1) Situation surrounding your task. (2) Task you undertook, or were assigned, to address the situation. (3) Actions to accomplish the task. (4) Results of your actions.

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Ten Rules For Negotiating A Job Offer

- Haseeb Qureshi tl;dr: Haseeb explains each of the following in detail: (1) Get everything in writing. (2) Always keep the door open. (3) Information is power. (4) Always be positive. (5) Don’t be the decision maker. (6) Have alternatives. (7) Proclaim reasons for everything. (8) Be motivated by more than just money. (9) Understand what they value. (10) Be winnable.

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