Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Get that job at Facebook (2012)

facebook.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 174 posts

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#121

Post by nilkn »

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…

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

I don't think that was his point at all, with all due respect. I got the impression he was just criticizing the rather stereotypical technical interview, which Facebook seems to subscribe to very strongly based on the article.

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#122

Post by therandomguy »

dudurocha wrote: post #37
sriramk wrote: post #25

I should also point out that Facebook is hiring not just engineers but also designers, product managers, infrastructure people,... I just joined a couple of weeks ago as a product manager and in the short time here, I've loved it.

How is the interview for a product manager?

I was hoping to get an answer as well.

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#123

Post by bshastry »

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…

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

It is wrong to conclude that the person whose comment you replied to, feels that way. Excerpt: "Needing to "prep" and "practice" coding questions in the way encouraged seems rather odd to me." [emphasis added]

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#124

Post by freshfunk »

kubrickslair wrote: post #45
CoolGuySteve wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

From the post: "Good coding problems are fractal in nature. They can be extended arbitrarily to gauge the depth of your knowledge. For example, you might be asked to solve a problem any way you want. Then you'll be asked to solve it again in constant space or sub-linear time."

You could prepare for months but if you don't understand the core CS concepts then it's difficult to hack these kinds of interview problems. Having a solution is one thing, but coming up with 3 different solutions to the same problem based on various constraints (preprocessing, space/time constraints) requires understanding.

If they "hacked" this, then thru likely understand the concepts well enough such that its sufficient for the job.

Also, interviewers should ask if they interviewee has seen the coding problem before and come prepared with a backup. Interviewers are also looking to see if the interviewee derives the answer too easily. Usually scraping the surface reveals whether the person really knows what they're talking about or not.

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#125

Post by bbillings »

orangethirty wrote: post #113
bbillings wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dwek7dZDFN0 is a pretty good talk about everything coming down the pipe. Generics, Strict typing, Collections, etc.

Too my knowledge (I'm not directly on the Hip-Hop team) it will be open sourced, additionally we also generally present a PHP patch as well to allow it in future versions of standard PHP.

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#126

Post by LockeWatts »

btilly wrote: post #115
robrenaud wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most interview questions are verbal, and a laptop is capable of compiling code. Your problems with it seems factitious.

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#127

Post by zerr »

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…

The main downside of these kind of interviews is that the candidate has to prepare.

This may be well suited for fresh grads, but not for mid-career senior engineers.

You should seek good candidates as is. But, you already assume that one needs to prepare...

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#128

Post by freshfunk »

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…

At the larger tech companies, many of their problems typically are an issue of scale. They are dealing with large datasets, massive numbers of users, terabytes of data, etc.

When dealing with scale, its important to have efficient solutions. They may need to be time efficient or space efficient due to constraints. Even though space is cheap and hardware is fast, inefficient algos may never work or be very high cost.

Maybe you won't be the one implementing this infrastructure but you may be implementing code on top of this infrastructure and it matters that you understand (at least the basics) the consequences of designing things a certain way.

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#129

Post by bbillings »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #116
bbillings wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So we do lock-downs still, but it's not about working crazy hours, it's about focus. Under lock-down you are allowed to push the other stuff to the side for awhile. For instance I typically do 2-3 interviews a week, help with training new interviewers, etc. This can easily be 5-6 hours of total time out of my week. This is part of being an engineer at Facebook. Onboarding sessions, new engineer mentoring, etc. This is all part of normal workdays, unless you are in a lock-down, then you focus on getting whatever it is you need to get done done and not worry about the rest for awhile.

I personally disagree pretty heavily on sleeping in the office and working crazy hours. I find it very counter productive and generally think it leads to bad decisions, bad code, and ultimately bad products. It is certainly the exception, and not something you should be doing if you aren't 22 years old and/or more than a little crazy. I personally haven't worked crazy hours at Facebook since probably 2009.

Talking about this sort of thing from a PR perspective seems has to balance getting people excited about our environment and explaining our goals and day-to-day. I've found it's something the media outlets love to play up. The normal day-in-the-life of an engineer is fun, but chill, and not particularly news worthy.

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#130

Post by jkrems »

aristus wrote: post #70
CoolGuySteve wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

(Author of the post) Consider this: In any job you're going to do "normal" stuff the majority of the time. The other times, you have to pull out A-level work. It's not 24x7, but when the time comes you have to be able to do it, eg writing a parser for an obscure query language that will get executed $X billion times per day, so it better be small, correct, and fast. We ask people to prep because we want to know if yo…

Well, that sounds just weird. Either you expect the people being interviewed as part of their prep to learn and remember forever everything they ever may need at Facebook and that could possibly be asked in the interview, or your argument doesn't make sense. If I hadn't any contact with parsers/compilers for a while I will need to look stuff up. When you have no frame of reference in my process when getting the information necessary to solve the problem - how can that possibly be a good indicator of me being able to solve an unforeseen problem? If there is a known solution and I already have the exact algorithm, the hard part is over and it's only about writing code. Which is exactly what people seem to complain here: The skill to reproduce a known algorithm is at best the lowest possible bar.
Post reply on HN