Facebook senior software engineer interview

The comp offers aren’t even that great, even compared to midrange tech companies, especially for senior / staff level engineers.

I worked at a midrange ecommerce and content licensing firm, about 20-25 years old, in a major US city, and my total comp as a senior engineer (6 years of experience then) was in the range of $350k between salary, equity and bonus, and this was over a decade ago.

If you find a company that values you and needs your skills, you can get high comp at lots of places, and many have much better work / life balance, less wanton dysfunction and less political drama in the workplace.

Even a 50% or 100% increase over the $350k isn’t worth debasing myself with “dance monkey dance” whiteboard hazing. You might as well ask Facebook to give you a dunce cap on your first day, or a t-shirt that says, “My lack of self-respect is so severe that I agreed to do Facebook’s interview process.”

The mere fact that I’d actually be valued at the $350k place and wouldn’t be rectally probed to ensure I am fungible with every other assembly line programmer is a big indicator that my total earnings over a long time are likely to be much higher away from a place like Facebook. Generous scheduled equity refreshers are no match for actually rising in responsibility and skill growth to critical new positions in a firm.

> CLRS is over 1000 very dense pages.

CLRS is in fact over 1000 pages, but it's not very dense, quite the opposite. It goes in painstaking detail about every single minutia you could possibly be thinking of, often formally proving things that everyone with even a modicum of mathematical education should be able to independently come up with a proof for (white path theorem, anyone?).

All of that is great for beginners (there's a reason it's a standard textbooks), but I remember that even when I was in school I found it a little too verbose and used to prefer the Sedgewick.

With that said, I still agree that the author's timetable is very optimistic.

For better or worse, when you get to a certain size you absolutely NEED that level of bureaucracy. You can't get 120,000 full time employees plus probably another 100,000 contractors to work together without establishing a clear hierarchy that everyone inside it understands. A smaller company can have different approaches because they will have a dense network of employee relationships, and can work together off of those relationships. However, at six figure employee scale by necessity you will end up with a very very sparse matrix of employee relationships, so you have to have something else to get results.

The best way to prepare for a fanng interview is to have friends there and get fast tracked on easy mode.

FB rejected me twice and both times I followed a study plan much like the blog and in my case it turned out that I got too complicated with it and spent too much time on cool shit like dynamic programming, tries, all-pairs shortest paths but I should have stuck to drilling the simple data structures like stacks and BSTs cause that is all I ever got asked about.

I also got backchannelled during the behavioral the 2nd time around which I suspect may have been defamation. In the end my fan club did me a favor helping me dodge a bullet because I probably would have accepted an offer until I read about how bad morale at facebook really is (which in hindsight was reflected loud and clear in the conduct of the aforementioned behavioral).

One thing I have noticed about remote interviewing in general but especially with facebook is how disgustingly filthy some of the panelist's backgrounds were. During the portion where the candidate is allowed to ask questions I wanted to ask "Damn, you live like this?"

But that's not how it works. You are almost always free to use why language you want. There are exceptions to this but in those cases it would be clearly indicated in the job description.