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Get that job at Facebook (2012)

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Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#101

Post by victorhn »

kamaal wrote: post #72
kubrickslair wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another reason I am not fond of this- it is easily hackable. I know some pretty average people who prepared for months, went through all questions they could find online, ignored their day jobs and cleared the interviews, while some really talented people could not. Funny that this got brought on the Facebook thread. Though I never applied at FB, I have 'mentored' two people who made it through the process. Mentoring…

Its very easy to game the interview at big web companies. I mean even if they ask all these text book academia related questions- Algo/DS ones etc. I remember once there was a question on Quora about an IIT BTech guy who had offers from all major web companies. Some one asked him how he did it. And his advice was that you had to simply 'practice'. Simply go out on the internet check for good interview forums work on…

Care to put the quora link to see what the guy said and not a possibly altered version?

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#102

Post by kamaal »

kubrickslair wrote: post #88
kamaal wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its very easy to game the interview at big web companies. I mean even if they ask all these text book academia related questions- Algo/DS ones etc. I remember once there was a question on Quora about an IIT BTech guy who had offers from all major web companies. Some one asked him how he did it. And his advice was that you had to simply 'practice'. Simply go out on the internet check for good interview forums work on…

Agree on all points. Interesting that you brought IIT up. Though I barely cleared IIT JEE and did not attend it for I could not get CS at any of the good schools, I had the feeling that it was becoming more and more hackable with the proliferation of coaching institutes. When I was in a top 5 PhD program which attracts the best of IIT K/B/M guys the quality drop became more evident over the years. There were and are…

>>there are cram shops in India which 'train' you to clear Google/ Microsoft interviews.

This is so true, that I can't even find ways how to assert it more.

As a fresher, I attended a off campus interview here in Bangalore(Those who don't know- these are generally mass hiring drives, where hundreds/thousands get hired) where I happened to talk to a guy between written test sessions who even had taken very elaborate 'class notes' on clearing these interviews. He had gone through something like a 3 months coaching class just to attend these interviews. There are standard coaching materials, which are updated pretty frequently. Pretty much anything that they can ask you in these interviews will be covered. They have made you hard practice it so much it will be cake walk to you make it through.

>>And this has been going for at least 6 years

I can assure this has been going on for a very long time now.

>>It's all very funny and ironic.

Its all about the volumes. A recruiter told me, if a resumes falls down during a mass hiring drive they don't even bother to pick it up. We live in an era where recruiters search monster.com based on some keywords and pick up candidates based on that. So we are now down to SEO optimization for resumes. And then coaching classes to game the interviews.

As a side note, in all major IT services companies in India you have to take 'certification exams' for pay hikes and promotions. I've seen people drop everything they do and practice clearing these for months. The worst part is you have to 'memorize' the whole material. Later I would see those people go on to get promotions and hikes, while the actual who go the work done fail(due to lack of time to practice) in the certification exams.

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#104

Post by nthj »

robrenaud wrote: post #98
btilly wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is one answer for you. Many programmers will take longer to configure their environment than you have available for the interview. Therefore if you tried to let them interview in the programming environment of their choice, there would be no actual interview. (And you'd have to undo whatever they did before the next interview.)

Let the candidate bring a laptop?

Yes, this easily solves many problems. Plus I get to see exactly how they are used to working, neatly avoiding many "tell me about your environment" questions.

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#105

Post by ciupicri »

btilly wrote: post #80
zoba wrote: post #75

> "Practice writing code in a simple text editor without syntax highlighting or completion macros." Maybe applicants shouldn't be able to "undo" during the interview? Or maybe applicants should be able to manually convert the code to assembler? Or, heck, have them use one of those behemoth computers with the blinking lights that we have to plug wires into sockets to program? I mean...why should we rely on any technol…

Here is one answer for you. Many programmers will take longer to configure their environment than you have available for the interview. Therefore if you tried to let them interview in the programming environment of their choice, there would be no actual interview. (And you'd have to undo whatever they did before the next interview.)

Configuring the environment shouldn't take more than 5 minutes. You copy the settings files, update them a bit if needed and that's it.

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#106

Post by vjeux »

btilly wrote: post #67
ritchiea wrote: post #31

I hope this doesn't sound facetious, but what I hear over and over again is that places like Facebook have difficult technical interviews that are algorithm focused to create more false negatives than false positives because they work on hard problems. What are some concrete examples of hard problems tech companies face that require novel solutions and why are algorithms problems the best way to find the people quali…

What are some concrete examples of hard problems tech companies face that require novel solutions and why are algorithms problems the best way to find the people qualified to solve them? This is best answered by awesome example. See http://research.google.com/people/jeff/ for a list of some the problems that one Google programmer met, and solved. Many of said problems were novel at the time, though many have now lear…

/What are some concrete examples of hard problems tech companies face that require novel solutions/

I'm a User Interface Engineer at Facebook in the Photos team. One common thing we do is to display photos in a grid. This is one subject that's really important, yet I haven't see any good documentation about it. I've first looked at all the websites that did some interesting image layouts algorithms, reproduced them and documented them.

Google Plus: http://blog.vjeux.com/2012/image/image-layout-algorithm-goog... Lightbox: http://blog.vjeux.com/2012/image/image-layout-algorithm-ligh... Lightbox Android: http://blog.vjeux.com/2012/image/image-layout-algorithm-ligh... 500px: http://blog.vjeux.com/2012/image/image-layout-algorithm-500p...

Unfortunately, none of them really suited our needs. We wanted to let users have the ability to make any (or all) images bigger. So I started playing around and writing a new image layout. The hardest part was to have an algorithm that was designed such that you could move images around in real time in ways that feel natural to the user, even though we have constraints that are impossible to solve.

Basic algorithm: http://blog.vjeux.com/2012/image/image-layout-algorithm-face... Reordering algorithm: http://blog.vjeux.com/2012/image/image-layout-algorithm-face...

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#107

Post by kubrickslair »

kamaal wrote: post #102
kubrickslair wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree on all points. Interesting that you brought IIT up. Though I barely cleared IIT JEE and did not attend it for I could not get CS at any of the good schools, I had the feeling that it was becoming more and more hackable with the proliferation of coaching institutes. When I was in a top 5 PhD program which attracts the best of IIT K/B/M guys the quality drop became more evident over the years. There were and are…

>>there are cram shops in India which 'train' you to clear Google/ Microsoft interviews. This is so true, that I can't even find ways how to assert it more. As a fresher, I attended a off campus interview here in Bangalore(Those who don't know- these are generally mass hiring drives, where hundreds/thousands get hired) where I happened to talk to a guy between written test sessions who even had taken very elaborate '…

>> where I happened to talk to a guy between written test sessions who even had taken very elaborate 'class notes' on clearing these interviews.

Pretty sure there would be coaching classes to get into coaching classes with higher hit rates of finally clearing the interviews. It's that broken.

Whenever people talk about the madness of India's youth, I can't help not quoting Soumen:

"It's hard to overstress the liability of a nation of a billion people out of which 700 million are functionally illiterate and the rest have no wish to follow instructions, even when they are asking for a favor."

http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/soumen/APKGKAH/illiterate/Applicat...

>> As a side note, in all major IT services companies in India you have to take 'certification exams' for pay hikes and promotions.

Hope you are fortunate enough to be not working for such places anymore.

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#108

Post by kamaal »

victorhn wrote: post #101
kamaal wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its very easy to game the interview at big web companies. I mean even if they ask all these text book academia related questions- Algo/DS ones etc. I remember once there was a question on Quora about an IIT BTech guy who had offers from all major web companies. Some one asked him how he did it. And his advice was that you had to simply 'practice'. Simply go out on the internet check for good interview forums work on…

Care to put the quora link to see what the guy said and not a possibly altered version?

Have a to create a new login to search. Forgot the old one. Don't have enough patience to go all over it again.

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#109

Post by aristus »

simonsarris wrote: post #95
lbrandy wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi. I work at facebook and do many interviews. Facebook still seems to be totally focused on code problems I would say that statement is categorically false. In fact, the article lists 4 criteria, only one of which would be "code problems". The interview certainly has a focus on coding, but it most assuredly is not a total focus. And people can, have, and will pass the coding bar, and still fail to get an offer. stuf…

> I don't think that is a well supported inference from the post in question. From the post in question: > [screening portion] The bulk of the time is spent on coding exercises. The interviewer will send you a link to a collaborative editor and ask you to solve some programming problems. > We will ask you to do a lot of coding during the interview process, because programming ability tends to correlate strongly with…

Hi, author here -- the article focuses on "code prep" because that's something you can brush up in a short-ish period of time. You can't become a nicer or more thoughtful person quickly, so on those parts of our criteria we take people as they are.

Implementing some well-known library functions is basically a quick way to see whether you know how they work.

If you don't feel it's necessary to ever practice for an interview, well, ok. This advice is not for you.

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#110

Post by milkbikis »

lbrandy wrote: post #73
simonsarris wrote: post #46

I really like this kind of post and I wish more companies would write about their expectations before you actually get to the interview. Still, it seems like rather run-of-the-mill process. It will certainly filter out the bad, but you may miss some very good workers who work in different ways. Facebook still seems to be totally focused on code problems, and doesn't even mention if what you've already built is import…

Hi. I work at facebook and do many interviews. Facebook still seems to be totally focused on code problems I would say that statement is categorically false. In fact, the article lists 4 criteria, only one of which would be "code problems". The interview certainly has a focus on coding, but it most assuredly is not a total focus. And people can, have, and will pass the coding bar, and still fail to get an offer. stuf…

Hi! Just pitching in here as an outsider who has interviewed twice with Facebook and talked to quite a few others (mostly fresh graduates) who have. I did not receive an offer on both occasions, but I'll try to remain unbiased. I did receive an offer from Google and Quora, if it helps.

Facebook's interview process seems to have a very high variance in terms of candidates' experiences about the process. In the telephone rounds, collabedit often has sync issues, which can be quite stressful for first timers. Occasionally, interviewers either do not speak clearly, keep moving away from the speakerphone or have a very difficult to understand accent (not sure how to solve this one). These two things compounded together have caused several people I know to have a terrible experience in the first round, and it appears that these issues are not taken into consideration when making a final decision, as was the case for me. I had two phone interviews because the first one had these issues. I was called to the campus for the final interviews, which I would certainly describe as "code problems", or more accurately as algorithm based problems. I actually found these interviews to be easier than the phone rounds, which was a common opinion among the other candidates I met. I was quite surprised to not get an offer and my guess is that the botched phone round had an effect, but I may be wrong.

This is intended as honest feedback rather than a sour grapes reaction to not being extended an offer. I have interviewed with several other companies and usually the experience is either consistently good or consistently bad, which at least gives the candidates a fair playing field. My guess would be that this feedback is getting ignored because it primarily comes from rejected candidates.

Finally, it would be great if software companies started sharing feedback about candidates' performance if they don't receive an offer instead of a cliched e-mail. Quora seems to be the only one doing this at the moment: https://www.quora.com/Quora-Recruiting/Can-I-get-the-feedbac...

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