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Get that job at Facebook (2012)

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Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#111

Post by somethingnew »

gburt wrote: post #94
somethingnew wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For my Facebook interview for an internship, I was given a simple string manipulation problem which I solved quickly. Then I was given the N-Queens problem (a more generalized version of this one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_queens_puzzle ). Needless to say I didn't solve that with my remaining time, since the interviews are only 45 minutes. I didn't feel it was a fair assessment of my skills.

Where there other constraints on your N-queens? (no bruteforce? no backtracking? must run in X time?)

Really it was just write code to verify whether it can be done or not (return boolean) based on the N input (integer). Without having to write code it would return true for N >= 4, but I didn't know that. I was just trying to get an initial solution down with recursion, not thinking about backtracking yet or worst case time (which was probably 2^N).

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#112

Post by btilly »

ciupicri wrote: post #105
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.)

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.

Download and install software. Download and install necessary plugins. Play with window manager settings. Deal with the fact that the version that you are used to using has changed in the last 18 months and needs to be retweaked to behave like you want it to.

I've seen people spend days getting themselves set up exactly the way that they want. And looking at http://xkcd.com/1205/ it isn't obvious that this is a waste of time either.

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#113

Post by orangethirty »

bbillings wrote: post #34
orangethirty wrote: post #2

Does facebook still use PHP?

Yes, but no. Since moving to HipHip which is a translated/compiled version of PHP, we have been able to fork the language to clean it up. We have a strongly typed version, Generators, etc. Syntactically it looks a lot like PHP and is backward compatible for many thing, but it's not really PHP anymore. The HipHop team has done a ton to make the language a lot more enjoyable to work in.

I did not know you went to such extent. At that scale that makes sense. Do you plan to open source it?

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#114

Post by NoodleIncident »

vjeux wrote: post #106
btilly wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

That's some very cool stuff. Thanks!

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#115

Post by btilly »

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?

There are lots of good reasons why you might not want random people plugging in their laptops on your computer, and likewise reasons that you wouldn't want them to walk away with your interview materials loaded on their personal computer.

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#116

Post by aaronbrethorst »

bbillings wrote: post #38
coldcode wrote: post #4

Why? Work 70 hours a week finding new ways to put more ads in people's lives.

I'm not sure why this is such a common misconception. I almost never work 70, or 60 hour weeks. 50, often, but that's usually my own fault for making promises to others I want to keep. I've managed inside Engineering at Facebook and am now back to just being a straight Engineer, and my advice to everyone I work with is the same: Don't kill yourself working 70/80 hour weeks. We pay you to give 40 solid hours, and that…

Because it seems like every mainstream news article about engineering at Facebook is written like this one: http://www.fastcompany.com/3005165/how-facebook-survived-34-...

Maybe it's Facebook PR's fault.

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#117

Post by orangethirty »

Working at fb sounds like cool experience. Though im wary of companies who still make one suffer through such interviews. Thats what keps me as a contractor. None of that interviews funny business.

Fb recruiter, if you read this, shoot me an email.

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#118

Post by pbreit »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #35
kubrickslair wrote: post #28

Never interviewed at Facebook but have been offered roles at similarly hard to get places. Though I am working at my own startup now, the absurdness of the interviewing process at majority of such places confounds me. In short, I can't cope up with them well without going through quite a few glassdoor type questions of that respective company. And partially it is because most interviewers already have a set of soluti…

The thing that really bothers me about these postings is the advice that you should 'prep'. Conceivably, many applicants will already have a job that requires them to code 8 hours a day. But somehow, the skills required to pass their interview are so out of line with what a programmer does day to day, that extracurricular studying is required. It would suggest that the interview itself selects for mostly irrelevant s…

> really bothers me about these postings is the advice that you should 'prep'

Advice to prep bothers you? Wow! I thought it went without saying that any endeavor of import benefits from prep.

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#119

Post by LockeWatts »

aristus wrote: post #109
simonsarris wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 int…

Have you stopped to consider that given the pressure situation of an interview at a well respected company, and without the common resources a programmer generally works with (an IDE and reference documentation), that a person might have trouble with this despite understanding how it works?

It seems like you should be asking 'Write me something to do X, using Y from the standard library' and evaluating that code, if you're looking to evaluate how well someone knows a library function.

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#120

Post by LockeWatts »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #96
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…

> In my opinion, stuff that someone has made should probably be considered the most important thing by miles. It doesn't have to be open-source code, but that certainly helps. Problem is, a lot of good engineers (especially at big companies) may have spent a lot of time working on something that wasn't very important or good. They may have been a sparkling diamond in a sea of mediocrity. One of my first jobs I spent…

Why not make it an either or type of thing. "Would you rather solve an algorithm based question, or discuss some work you've done in the past that demonstrates that aptitude?"
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