Interview mechanics

Senior interviews test whether you can solve a problem. Staff and team lead interviews test whether you can pick the problem, frame it, and get other people to solve it with you. Different bar, different preparation. This chapter is the scoring rubric, the loop formats company by company, and the structural habits that decide the outcome before any technical content is exchanged.

The single most common failure at this level is telling senior-level stories in a staff-level interview: the story is about what you built, not about how the org changed. The second most common is doing the design round as requirements to boxes to done, skipping capacity math and the API contract, and never once saying "the alternative was X; I am not choosing it because Y; if Z changed I would revisit."

What this chapter covers

Source: §1 to §14 (except §4, which is Track A: the coding round), §27, §38.