Engineering Manager Interview Preparation

I have taken boot camp training sessions with IK in 2021/2022. After being with the same company as EM for years, my tech skills started softening out, and I wasn't ready to face interview questions in management and tech areas. Though I went through the route of self prep, I lost a few interviews as I could not provide answers that interviewers were expecting. With that experience, I researched a few companies who could provide me the training to update skills needed and came across Interview Kickstart. As the name indicates, Interview Kickstart is a domain expert in the area of providing bootcamp training to get trained for interviews. IK coaches are from reputed companies including FAANG,  they are their own domain experts and each person covers different areas of the training. It's great to chat with Managers from FAANG and other big companies and get their perspective on the management. Don't miss joining the orientation session with Soham Mehta, he provides values tips to get started, sets right expectations on the outcome of the course. IK’s course structure, tools, well qualified mentors, practice and feedback sessions helped me to improve my overall management skills and prepared me for  coding  and system design interviews. 

Interview Kickstart is the place to sign up for comprehensive and fun interview preparation. They have modules for general SWE roles covering in-depth DS/Algos/System Design, Career Coaching/Resume building and specific tracks for Engineering Managers, AI/ML, IOS Engineering, Embedded Systems and many others. The instructors are amongst the best from the industry with a passion for coaching and the course includes Classes, Homework question review sessions, Timed Tests, and Technical coaching sessions and most importantly Mock Interviews. There is no dearth of high-quality, well structured material that is very pertinent to interview prep. In addition the IK Program Advisors & IK Operations team are top notch.Soham, who founded IK with Ryan, have inspired many engineers to get better. I have gone back to IK twice in the past 7 years to gain valuable skills. 5-Star experience.

Interview Kickstart's (IK) Engineering Manager track is through and comprehensive. Both technical and behavioral tracks are  exhaustive and covers the latest topics in details. I was rusty on algorithms in general and especially on  the sorting/tree traversal methods. The technical track covers such concepts by illustrating the working of the algorithm and makes it easier to understand.  The feedback from the mock interviews by the IK panel helped me tremendously in securing offers from FANG companies. The panel is diverse and are typically from FANG companies. So their feedback is what exactly one needs in improving their chances for clearing tech interviews.

 I am glad that I made the right decision at the right time by selecting IK Engineering Management track. IK course boosted my confidence significantly and got a couple of offers in FAANG companies in just 4 months. Course is very rigorous & well-structured with lot of support throughout the journey in terms of mock interviews for both Technical and Leadership & Behavioral, foundation videos, Online classes & practice sessions, technical & career coaching and offer negotiations.I would like to specially call out the excellent foundation course by Omkar, in-depth system design classes by Niloy, Tilo, Data Structures & algorithms classes by Tom G by focusing on the patterns rather than pointed solutions. This pattern helped me a lot to think of the solution holistically rather than a pointed approach.I strongly suggest this course to someone who can spend more than 20hrs/week and has a strong technical and people management experience. Thanks  to IK for providing a platform to unlock the potential and alleviating the interview fear.

Pros:1. Curriculum was designed exceptionally well. Topics were in line with the trends expected by the high tech industry.2. The pattern of introducing concepts as foundational material, then following by examples through live classes worked really well.3. The live classes were conducted by professionals from the industry - this is a huge plus. As these were interactive, a wealth of valuable information was shared.4. The quality of instruction is top notch - both foundation material & live classes.5. Access to the instruction is available for good, which makes this really valuable. It can serve as a reference material for the entire career.6. Up-level as a sandbox environment for the code examples is an excellent choice. All the solutions to the exercise can be archived with memory consumed and running time.7. Up-level also archives all the instruction in a chronological order (based on time), so acts as a one stop shop.8. The leadership workshop was very valuable. Talking to the actual professionals working in the industry gave an opportunity to retrospect, and calibrate on the attributes of a good leader. 9. It was an action packed, dynamic, high paced computer science bootcamp that was enjoyable.10. The support period is really a well thought out idea, and is an icing on the cake. It provides a feedback loop where we could recalibrate and improve.Cons:1. The live system design classes could have followed a template and better time managed (part of them had an ad hoc feel to it).