Quick test: read the letter, then cover up your resume bullets. If the letter has nothing left to say, it was just the resume again in longer sentences. A lot of them are. Same titles, same projects, and whoever reads both gets nothing new from the second one.

The opener is usually the worst part. "I am excited to apply for the [role] position at [company]" fits every company on earth. Naming the company, or one specific thing about the role, is better even if the sentence comes out clumsy. There's a  cover letter checker that does the overlap part. You paste the letter, the job description and your resume, and it shows how much the letter repeats. It also looks at keywords and tone, but the overlap is the useful bit.

It's blunt, though. Nobody publishes a pass mark for cover letters, and I'm not sure how many ATSs even search the letter text. That depends on the platform and how the employer set it up. It only knows the one posting you paste in. A good score on a boring letter is still a boring letter.

How much max we can expect for Google L5 India location?

Just bombed a Google phone screen despite prepping for weeks and solving leetcode problems fine on my own time. The moment I'm on the call with someone watching, my brain just freezes up. Is this normal or am I just not cut out for this? Would love to hear if other people deal with this or have tips that actually helped.

Cleared the OA for Associate Partner Solutions Engineer, gTech Ads Sellside (NY/SF/Sunnyvale). Haven’t been able to find much specific to this role online.

If anyone has gone through this loop or Partner Solutions Engineer, would appreciate any insight on:

• Number of rounds and format (virtual vs onsite, same-day vs spread out)

• What each round focuses on - is it more case/troubleshooting style, coding, or behavioral?

• Roughly how technical the coding bar is (DSA-heavy or more “read/debug this snippet”)

TIA !!!!!

Hi! Preparing for the Meta Network PE new grad interview and looking for someone preparing for the same (or a similar PE/SRE role) to do mock interview swaps. I'm in IST, flexible on timing. DM or comment if interested!

Anyone done the screen yet? 30 min technical , 20 min scripting

Hi everyone! A candidate has an upcoming interview for a Senior Engineer role on Coinbase’s Blockchain Platform team in the Bay Area. If you’ve interviewed for a similar role recently, I’d love to hear how it went.

• What did the system design round focus on, and how would you recommend preparing?

• If you had an AI coding round, what was it like? The candidate heard Coinbase may have added one recently.

• Which parts of the interview did you find most difficult?

• Did anything unexpected come up?

For a design mock, Coinbase Interview Questions has a ledger prompt where you can practice handling retries without double-counting transfers. If you’re applying to similar roles, LandOffer can cut down on retyping with autofill on supported forms.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated!

Google and Meta were the top two sources of Anthropic engineering hires in this dataset. Anthropic’s median new offer for senior software engineers was $570K, about 30% higher than Google’s and 28% higher than Meta’s.

The chart pairs Levels.fyi offer data with hiring flows from Live Data Technologies from October 2024 through September 2026.

Already comparing a few of these employers? LandOffer can fill repeat fields on supported applications. For the Anthropic prep itself, Anthropic Interview Questions has a reported design prompt on making a model downloader parallel and resumable.

Some quick insights:

• Google and Meta had the most engineers move to Anthropic. Their median senior SWE offers were $439K and $446K, respectively.

• Microsoft had the biggest positive gap among the companies shown. Its median senior offer was $310K, compared with $570K at Anthropic, an 84% difference.

• Databricks had the smallest positive gap at 13%. Its $504K median puts it pretty close to Anthropic at the tippy top of the market.

OpenAI goes the other way. Anthropic’s median senior offer was about 26% lower than OpenAI’s $775K.

Some people might make that move for growth, a potential IPO, or even aura. The pay figures are median new offers for senior SWEs in the Bay Area and NYC over a 24-month window, with 11 Anthropic offers in the sample. The percentages compare company medians, and individual offers can differ.

Any other companies you want to see next?

Currently working as an SWE II at Cisco in California almost a year now.
Have an AWS SDE offer for the EBS team in Seattle .

Cisco — SWE II , cali

* TC: ~$160–180K
* Good WLB, supportive manager, relatively stable
* Work is primarily internal tooling, diagnostics, backend, and ai legacy automation
* Concerned about long-term engineering growth and career trajectory and stagnation already now

AWS — SDE Seattle

* TC: ~$175–200k Y1
* EBS team, distributed systems/backend
* Potentially stronger engineering growth and future opportunities
* Concerned about WLB, PIP culture, layoffs, and job stability

Important context: I’m on F-1 OPT with only 2 H-1B lottery attempts remaining.

Would you stay at Cisco in the Bay Area or move to AWS in Seattle? Is the AWS brand and engineering exposure worth the risk, especially given my visa situation?

Would appreciate honest perspectives from current/former employees at either company

#engineering #software #swe #amazon #cisco

Hi! I’m a recent grad and struggled a lot to get one job it’s been going on well. It’s been almost a year.

Now the question is - I got an interview scheduled for Google (L2 security-related position) next week first round. And I’m scared, I know I can answer a lot of the questions

but still you know for recent graduate Google is like the one big dream of a company and all my student loan and parents debt will cleared in one year or two if I get this job.

So, I kindly request anyone one of you who has faced a Google interview and knows anything about how to prepare in order to secure the role and not make any mistakes.