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Get that job at Facebook (2012)

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Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#141

Post by nilkn »

randartie wrote: post #87
7Figures2Commas wrote: post #62

Here's a question: at companies with these kind of approaches, how many of the founders and early employers would have done well in these interviews themselves? Obviously, services grow and the Facebook of 2013 is very different from the Facebook of 2004, but it's kind of funny to see companies that succeeded because the original team was able to ship (period) evolve to focus on hiring CS majors who can reinvent the…

If you inspect the actual early employees, a majority of them were ivy league grads who most certainly could solve these easy interview problems (It also helped that they could ship code).

That doesn't mean they would have done well in the interviews. Quite a different thing entirely, really. I mean, there's some correlation, but it's not that strong.

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#142

Post by nawitus »

rkuykendall-com wrote: post #41
mcrittenden wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, if the .php extensions on most of the URLs is any indication.

Hm, I clicked all around the site and wasn't able to get a .php in any of my URLs. They were all "clean" or "pretty" URLs, as I would expect from a profesional, large web app. I wonder why we have different URLs.

The redirect url for outgoing links has .php at the end.

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#143

Post by dokem »

Does anyone at facebook know how the full time hiring of interns works? I'm starting an internship in the bay area office in a few weeks and it looks like the odds of coming out with an offer are pretty slim. Right now there are ~500 people scheduled for the summer intern block and I believe that facebook currently only has about 1000 fulltime engineers. My understanding of internships at 'lesser' tech companies seems to be that if you impress your superiors you'll probably come out with an offer. The idea that i'm getting from facebook is that I have to compete against basically everyone else. I'm very excited by also a bit nervous.

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#146

Post by rlanday »

anonymoushn wrote: post #140
chacham15 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Facebook Hacker Cup had a similar problem: https://www.facebook.com/hackercup/problems.php?pid=53250625...

I almost solved it; after screwing around for a while trying to record only one value for each square, I realized you need to store two values for each square. If we’re looking for the upper-left corner we can put a window, each dead pixel/pixel “poisons” all the pixels less than the width of the window to the left of it and the height of the window above it. Then you just do a linear scan over the remaining pixels. I think my problem was that I used too much RAM because I was trying to store the whole 2D grid; you only need to keep one dimension in memory.

You can see people’s submissions here: https://www.facebook.com/hackercup/scoreboard?round=18989011...

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#147

Post by Sven7 »

Facebook needs to be asking candidates just 2 questions. (1)Can you increase the number of minutes per hour your mom spends on Facebook? (2)How much do we need to pay you to feel comfortable doing that?

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#148

Post by mattacular »

somethingnew wrote: post #52
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…

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.

Do they really expect people to solve 8 queens in under 45 minutes? Even if you already know how to approach the problem, writing out the code to do it would take most of that time it seems like.

Maybe they were trying to ascertain something else about their candidates. Like how they approach problem-solving in general?

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#149

Post by jaimebuelta »

kamaal wrote: post #64

>>Take your time preparing. Do code katas and practice interviewing with friends. Try solving the interview questions on our site. This makes me wonder, who or what kind of a candidate the person even trying to hire. Programming or any career for that matter is by and large a kind of job that requires you to perform everyday, you have to be consistent. Its not an Boxing match or America's got talent contest which hap…

The problem with the previous work done is that could be difficult to show or check. If you worked on a regular company, the work done is not available. I agree that a discussion about previously done software can be very interesting, but that could be gamed too...

I'm afraid that interviewing is never going to be easy for both...

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#150

Post by aristus »

zerr wrote: post #127
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…

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...

Hi, author here. With respect, I am a mid-career senior engineer too. I trained for a few weeks before interviewing at Facebook because, well, changing jobs is important. There is zero harm spending some time warming up mentally.

I recommend that people prepare because I've seen many many obviously smart people not make it through. It's like showing up for a singing audition without warming up your voice. You might have a beautiful voice, but you have to show it in the best condition possible.

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