Working for FAANG

[Fabulously]

Has anyone here worked for one of the tech giants?

Just curious about the interview process, culture, salary etc.

I have a job interview coming up at one soon (London), I imagine it will be highly competitive and fairly tough, but they have framed it as a casual chat so no idea what to expect.

I mainly have experience in government so this feels a bit different and new and I’m sure the trusty star method is what they’re after.

He he, not a specific method, it will be unstructured. They haven't prepared their questions but they know what they care about. They will have read your CV and will make relevant conversation. It'll be vibe based

Tell me about yourself. What interests you about this role or company. What's you ambitions. Then based on your answers they will ask follow up questions, ask you opinions on things etc

Read Cracking the Coding Interview - it's still basically good.

Look them up on https://they.whiteboarded.me/companies-that-whiteboard.html to see if they will, in fact, whiteboard you.

in my OP I meant to say I’m NOT sure that they’re after the star method! Ooops

thanks everyone, brilliant advice. The details of the interview are scant so far, 30 mins video meeting, no idea how many people attending or how formal it might be or whether there’s different stages etc. I’ve attended informal chats before that have ended up being full blown interviews before so trying to glean as much information as possible!

Ahhh they are on the list!

You'll be fine! Keep calm and grind on Leetcode. It can be helpful to just do a few problems to remind yourself they are trivial, really. It's all a performance. In other industries people pretend to care about corporate strategy and KPIs, in ours, we pretend we all invert binary trees at work every day.

Yes, in my company they’re always competency based questions, 3 per interview. STAR method. Sometimes they will tell you the competency, sometimes not. Dependent on the level of role you’re going for it can be between 3-5 interview stages. Find out about their culture on their website. You will find a page along the lines of ‘values’ etc. make sure you take the buzz words from that. Salary higher than equivalent roles in smaller companies but also expectations are high. Good luck

Thanks everyone. another question, what are the pre employment checks like? Is it just standard reference of dates worked?

It massively depends on the role. Many do background checks even if there's no SC requirements. You can usually find this out by looking up something like "Careers Privacy Notice" on their policy documents. Or google the company and "background check". For example Meta have a private investigator firm and they will go back to high school, investigate your family (wider screening), etc. Many FAANGs are targets of industrial and state espionage.

(I put a link to one above but MN just blocks all my posts with links and I couldn't be bothered posting it 19 times to make it go through, so you're on your own to Google!)

@Lanva I’m not worried about those sorts of things in a background check per se as I’ve passed those in the past, however I don’t believe my current employer would give a good reference if asked because I put in a grievance against my manager. So I guess I’m more concerned about whether they would accept a general reference of dates worked.