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Get that job at Facebook (2012)

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Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#131

Post by aaronbrethorst »

bbillings wrote: post #129
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

    I personally disagree pretty heavily on
    sleeping in the office and working crazy hours.
I agree completely. Facebook's tried to recruit me on at least one occasion and I turned them (you?) down flatly for this reason (that, and I don't want to ever have to write PHP).

I get that you don't have complete control of the press you get, but maybe it'd be worth focusing some attention on these work-life balance issues in the outlets you do have complete control over.

    getting people excited about our environment
1 billion users. Boom, done.

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#132

Post by jamesaguilar »

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…

It is so cool that you guys can post about this stuff externally. It's one of my few regrets working at G. Thanks for the interesting reading.

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#133

Post by jkrems »

martypitt wrote: post #61
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…

This sounds awesome. The next time I interview for a position somewhere, I really hope it's closer to this, than to obscure problem solving trivia. The next time I interview someone to work for me, I really hope I can make the experience as collaborative and rewarding as it sounds this was for you. The kinda person who I can work through this interview with is exactly the kinda person I wanna work for / employ.

Other company with a similar process (in my experience): Yammer

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#134

Post by kubrickslair »

freshfunk wrote: post #124
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…

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. H…

I don't disagree with anything you say. As I mentioned earlier that all people who hack such interviews do have basic understanding/skills requisite for the corp, quite enough to play the gymnastics of the interviews.

A good interviewer does try to gauge whether the answer was known to the interviewee. But I have seen that happen far more at hot startups than big companies- primarily because of their more stringent process which leaves less wiggle room for guess work and is more tuned towards concretely judged parameters.

I just don't like the facade of 'hiring the smartest people' in the world, when their mechanism largely filters just well-trained average people.

And I most certainly don't want to sound condescending, so I apologize before-hand. But I probably used a different definition of average than what you or most people here may have in mind. I know quite a few ACM ICPC world finalists, am a region finalist myself, and have conducted/ published CS research with reasonable impact. So I was simply using my PhD program peers as good, and people with lesser (proven) skills as average. My fault, but I hope you can see what I was trying to say.

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#135

Post by charleslmunger »

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…

This was my experience interviewing at Facebook. I spent one interview solving a problem in a way that was more efficient than the default, recursive solution. My interviewer was obviously disappointed, and wondered why I wasted so much time when a less efficient solution would have sufficed.

That was the exact opposite of my experience interviewing at Google, and when I got an offer from Google I took it.

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#136

Post by rozap »

rdl wrote: post #23

The comments on that post are an excellent indictment of Facebook comments/public posting. They're almost Youtube level.

They're sub youtube level. 80% of those people are either illiterate or spam bots. It was cringe worthy.

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#137

Post by mikro2nd »

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…

Or,... the stuff I built in the first 10 or so years of my career is classified. I'd have to kill you if you saw it. Some of it was pretty cool stuff, though.

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#138

Post by xiaoma »

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…

>You can't become a nicer or more thoughtful person quickly Why not?

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#139

Post by bulatb »

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 people who already work in software feel the need to study for an interview, it's a pretty decent indication that the interview itself is... not ideal.

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#140

Post by anonymoushn »

chacham15 wrote: post #71
gamegoblin wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I reading the problem incorrectly or is that just ridiculously easy?

As stated this seems really easy. I think it is supposed to be more like Meebo where the users can resize/move every window (i.e. they dont have to be aligned to any boundary) and they recieve a new message. The Meebo software wants to place a new 100x200 window not on top of any existing window. Write the algorithm to determine where to place it. Then generalize the algorithm to WxH. Hard enough? (If not, find an al…

Is there a linear time solution? The normal solution is O(N^3) in the number of windows (and does not depend on W,H at all).
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