Get that job at Facebook (2012) • Hacker News Board

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#151

Post by aristus » Mon, Apr 29, 2013, 2:04 PM UTC

LockeWatts wrote: post #119

aristus wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Knowing the argument signature" and "knowing how to implement the guts" are two very different things. I personally don't care if you can remember fine details of the API. We ask many kinds of questions; in the article these are only examples.

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#152

Post by Evbn » Mon, Apr 29, 2013, 3:08 PM UTC

bulatb wrote: post #139

aristus wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Please share what is the ideal interview.

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#153

Post by Evbn » Mon, Apr 29, 2013, 3:11 PM UTC

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...

They can't test you on the intricacies of your current project, because they don't know them.

An interview needs a greatest common denominator. That is what an undergraduate CS test is.

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#154

Post by Evbn » Mon, Apr 29, 2013, 3:11 PM UTC

LockeWatts wrote: post #120

jiggy2011 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?"

Because I don't know how to judge past work in your niche. My niche is different.

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#155

Post by Evbn » Mon, Apr 29, 2013, 3:13 PM UTC

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…

If you don't care enough to skip a couple of episodes of Mad Men and warm up your brain before you come in, you aren't interested in working here.

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#156

Post by Evbn » Mon, Apr 29, 2013, 3:15 PM UTC

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…

Why couldn't talented people also game the interview?

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#157

Post by Evbn » Mon, Apr 29, 2013, 3:17 PM UTC

kubrickslair wrote: post #107

kamaal wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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 liabili…

Broken? It sounds exactly how optimization systems work :-)

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#158

Post by Evbn » Mon, Apr 29, 2013, 3:19 PM UTC

kubrickslair wrote: post #134

freshfunk wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

Well trained average people are good enough to do great things. That is a feature, not a bug.

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#159

Post by Evbn » Mon, Apr 29, 2013, 3:21 PM UTC

charleslmunger wrote: post #135

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.

Knowing when to not microoptimize is a skill.

Honestly, you should have decided based on compensation, geography, etc. The jobs are similar. But you microptimized :-)

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#160

Post by thedufer » Mon, Apr 29, 2013, 3:46 PM UTC

ciupicri wrote: post #103

> Give feedback. We regularly survey candidates about the interview process and take feedback seriously. Yet so few companies give feedback.

From a legal perspective, that's a dangerous move. There are any number of ways an interviewer's feedback could be misinterpreted (or correctly interpreted, I suppose) as being an illegal reason for issuing a no-hire. Even if you're careful, there's a non-zero chance of a really bad outcome. It just isn't worth it.