The Tech Career Podcast with Fexingo: Engineering Jobs, Interviews, and FAANG Career Strategy

The Tech Career Podcast with Fexingo: Engineering Jobs, Interviews, and FAANG Career Strategy

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The Tech Career Podcast with Fexingo: Engineering Jobs, Interviews, and FAANG Career Strategy episodes

  • How to Negotiate Stock Compensation at FAANG

    Lucas and Luna break down how FAANG engineers negotiate equity compensation — RSUs, refreshers, and the signing bonus trade-off. Using a real case of a Facebook offer from 2022, they explain why the four-year cliff matters, how to read a stock-based total comp sheet, and why negotiating RSU count is harder than salary. They also cover which levers actually move: sign-on bonus, annual cash bonus targets, and the rare but valuable front-loaded equity request. If you're an engineer with a FAANG offer or thinking of switching jobs, this episode gives you the exact language and logic to use in the negotiation room.

    #FAANG #StockCompensation #RSU #EquityNegotiation #TechCareer #EngineeringJobs #CompensationStrategy #Refresher #SigningBonus #TotalComp #Meta #Google #Apple #Amazon #Microsoft #CareerAdvice #FexingoBusiness #BusinessPodcast

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    9 min
  • Why System Design Interviews Are Different at FAANG

    In this episode of The Tech Career Podcast, Lucas and Luna unpack why system design interviews at FAANG companies test fundamentally different skills than coding interviews. They walk through the infamous 'design Twitter' question, explain how interviewers evaluate trade-offs over correct answers, and share concrete preparation strategies that go beyond memorizing whiteboard diagrams. Lucas breaks down the four pillars of a strong system design response: requirements gathering, back-of-the-envelope calculations, data model choices, and bottleneck analysis. Luna pushes back on whether candidates can realistically prepare without insider knowledge, and Lucas reveals how practice with public case studies like YouTube, Uber, and WhatsApp levels the playing field. The episode closes with a critical look at how system design interviews are evolving for the AI era—and what that means for engineers targeting FAANG in 2026.

    #SystemDesign #FAANG #TechInterviews #EngineeringCareer #InterviewPrep #TechPodcast #CareerAdvice #LucasAndLuna #FexingoBusiness #BusinessPodcast #Technology #Scalability #DistributedSystems #BackOfTheEnvelope #TradeOffs #AIInterviews #Whiteboarding #SoftwareEngineering

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    9 min
  • How to Negotiate Your First Engineering Salary

    Lucas and Luna break down the specific strategies and scripts engineers can use to negotiate their first job offer in tech. Using the real case of a bootcamp grad who turned an $85,000 offer into $110,000 at a Series B startup, they walk through the exact preparation steps, the timing of when to bring up compensation, and how to frame counteroffers. Lucas shares a counterintuitive finding from a 2024 study on 10,000 tech offers: engineers who negotiate only on base salary leave equity and bonuses on the table. Luna presses on the emotional difficulty of negotiating when you feel lucky just to get an offer. Together they cover researching market data, the 'I need to think about it' pause, and why the first offer is almost never the final one. Practical, research-backed advice for early-career engineers who want to close the gap between their starting salary and what the role is worth.

    #SalaryNegotiation #EngineeringJobs #TechCareers #FirstOffer #BootcampGrad #Compensation #Equity #BaseSalary #SigningBonus #InterviewTips #CareerStrategy #FAANG #StartupSalary #TechSalary #LucasAndLuna #FexingoBusiness #BusinessPodcast #Technology

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    11 min
  • How a Google Engineer Landed a Job Without a Degree

    In this debut episode of The Tech Career Podcast, Lucas and Luna dissect the story of Sarah Chen, a self-taught engineer who landed a job at Google without a traditional computer science degree. They examine her strategy: building a portfolio of five open-source contributions, networking through 40 informational interviews, and acing the system design round. Lucas breaks down the numbers behind her approach, including the 3.2% callback rate on cold applications versus 47% through referrals. Luna pushes back on whether this is replicable or a survivor bias story. They also discuss the broader shift in tech hiring, with companies like Google and IBM dropping degree requirements for certain roles. The episode sets the tone for the show: specific case studies, hard data, and honest career strategy for engineers at every level.

    #Google #SarahChen #TechCareer #SelfTaughtEngineer #NoDegree #EngineeringJobs #FAANG #TechHiring #PortfolioBuilding #ReferralStrategy #SystemDesign #InterviewPrep #CareerStrategy #Technology #TechPodcast #FexingoBusiness #BusinessPodcast #CareerAdvice

    Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo

    11 min

About The Tech Career Podcast with Fexingo: Engineering Jobs, Interviews, and FAANG Career Strategy

From the publisher's feed

Lucas and Luna strip the mystique from Big Tech hiring, walking real FAANG interview questions — from system design at Amazon to behavioral loops at Google — and the specific preparation strategies that separate successful candidates from those who get ghosted. They analyze leaked interview rubrics, break down how hiring committees weigh competing signals, and discuss when it makes sense to target a lower-tier offer for faster equity growth. Lucas brings the data: offer-negotiation leverage points, vesting schedules, and the probability of passing each interview stage based on public Glassdoor and Levels.fyi data. Luna pushes back with the human factors — how anxiety, overconfidence, and burnout affect performance, and why some engineers bomb take-home assignments despite perfect LeetCode scores. Together, they map the career lattice beyond FAANG: fintech, defense tech, climate tech, and the growing SaaS companies that now offer comparable total compensation packages. They also tackle the trade-offs between IC and management tracks, the rise of staff-plus roles, and how to decide whether to join a startup pre- or post-Series B. Every episode is grounded in a real job listing, a published compensation dataset, or a named company policy. If you're an engineer plotting your next move — or just trying to understand how the tech talent market actually works — this is the conversation you want to overhear.