How I Landed a $18,000 remote job
By: Aashish Peepra
Tags: Interview, Full Stack, Coding, Coding Interviews

How I Landed a $18,000 remote job

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

I’ve always seen people posting about getting a job in FAANG or other companies. I always wondered what’s the exact path to follow. Recently I applied for a job and after 4 interviews I got it.

I’m going to describe each interview with the questions asked. Hope this will help you.

One last thing before we start. I’m a full-stack developer & good with DevOps. I applied for a Software developer role. Co-managing the Backend, internal architecture, and sometimes Frontend. The company was providing Geo-positional analytics to builders using GIS.

First Round — Introduction

The first round was for the introduction. The questions included

Details about recent projects. What’s the hardest problem that you solved while working at that job/project. What are your expectations from this job? why do you want to work with us? All other why’s and what’s.

There were many questions like this.

For these rounds, what I do is a background check. If you are applying for web development, you can check for responsiveness issues on the website. How you can enhance the SEO and provide feedback about their company. A good understanding of the company at the first interview is a plus.

Whenever there is a silent gap, fill it with your curiosity about their company.

Now remember, you will only get selected for this round if you have a good Resume.

Second Round — Technical

In the first round, I was assigned a task to find bugs in their web application. I created a list of 18 bugs including Backend issue, Frontend, and user experience, and mailed them right away.

When you are trying to find bugs, use the application as a five-year-old kid. A kid who’s ready to break the website because it runs.

Ultimately second round consisted of discussions related to those bugs. Then the company had their Technical lead on Google meet this time. The technical lead asked me :

Which project is the biggest achievement of my life up to now. What stack did I use to create it? I mapped the entire architecture for my best project so I explained that. How I managed the communication between all four servers and how I focused on “people’s first code”. You can take a look at the stack here. A little about my background with Technology and experiences in different projects. Do I know about testing frameworks? I answered I know jest.

This was not yet the coding round. All the questions were generalized but the answers I gave were technically biased. Because by this round they were expecting to know my technical knowledge.

Third Round — Coding

Finally, this was the round where they called their Technical Guru. The person who established their entire STACK. Theinterview started with “ What do you prefer for backend — Django / Nodejs”, I answered Nodejs.

The round follows accordingly —

What’s Nodejs runtime? Describe the event loop. What do you mean by Nodejs is single-threaded? If it’s single-threaded then is it possible to do multi-tasking with it? If not, then why is it created as single-threaded? Which AWS services have I used? How did I use them? Asked about AWS SNS. A few more Nodejs related questions. What do I know about TDD or Chaos computing.

The round proceeds with a System Design question. And this is the first System design question I ever answered.

The question was, “There’s an American service which allows people to ask the stuff they want to be picked up from a certain location and get delivered. A person can order medicines, which then will be picked by a delivery boy and will be delivered to the customer’s house. How will you design a system for this?”.

I’m a developer, and I answered the question by describing how the Frontend can be created. The STACK can be used in the Backend and even the API endpoints. He later said that I need to describe the data structure that I will use to store the information. I knew it’s gonna be a tree but I didn’t know which one. In the end, I asked about the answer and he told “QuadTree”.

Fourth Round — Description & Final round

I had the last conversation with the CEO. This round was just details about the job offer. How things work in India as the company was operating from Canada. They also offered to buy me a Macbook for work purposes. They told me at the end of this round that only 2 candidates are there for evaluation. The interview started with 49 more people like me. And now it was just me and one other person.

A week later I received an email with my offer letter to join on immediate notice. The salary offer was $18,000. This was the first interview that I ever cleared.

I hope this was useful for those who read it. Thanks for your time. Best of luck with your journey.