How can anyone work at Facebooks nowadays and have a clear conscience. Is it just the salary? It is, isn't it? Just money. How depressing.
An effective way to change a culture is to participate in it.
Facebook senior software engineer interview
141–150 of 524 posts
Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview
#142Most of the people I know who did competitive programming in high school spent a just a few evenings preparing for FAANG interviews and still got offers in the end. I have the feeling that all the bitterness towards this interview process comes from people who refuse to do the initial investment of time to learn the foundation for solving coding challenges. Once you go through and understand a few hundred coding chal…
the problem is that DS/Algos interview questions, besides deep in low level programming, have little relevance in real life work scenarios. The only thing of value that my formal CS education gave me in respect to my day to day, really is the ability to problem solve.
Also, the reverse can be said about this - that individuals who had a more formal CS education are feeling bitter that more and more people are starting to realize that their time spent in "coding challenges" prove to be of low value in their work, so they keep hammering them in the only place they can - interviews.
Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview
#143Every time I read these posts I find them very depressing. Crunch through an enormous bunch of algorithm problems in order to perform well on some unrealistic whiteboard programming (I think the system engineering problems are actually more useful though) - as usual we've focused on the easy to measure metric rather than anything actually useful. Maybe these things are meant to be a proxy for how good you are at othe…
After 20 years in software, I had a phone interview with an Amazon guy who sounded half my age (at most). Asked me to write some kind of function to do something, sort some stuff or some such. I described verbally how I would do it, almost line by line, in pseudo-code. He said "I need you to write it out in [some language]". I said "But why? I just told you how I'd do it." But he needed me to literally write the code…
I am often on the other side interviewing the candidates for company I work for. For junior positions we do ask them to write some simple code e.g. matching parentheses or the like. It makes it very clear how much experience writing code given candidate has - typing speed, how they move around source file, even if they can seamlessly copy paste their code, etc., are all very telling.
Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview
#144Most of the people I know who did competitive programming in high school spent a just a few evenings preparing for FAANG interviews and still got offers in the end. I have the feeling that all the bitterness towards this interview process comes from people who refuse to do the initial investment of time to learn the foundation for solving coding challenges. Once you go through and understand a few hundred coding chal…
Mainly it's just annoying if you've been working for 4+ years and haven't touched that stuff in a while. It's an entirely separate skillset separate from your role as a developer. The fact that there have now been several studies showing it doesn't correlate with job performance makes its emphasis in interviews questionable.
There's also some fear on the "poseur" factor that people worry about. If candidates can simply rote-learn their way into senior roles I wouldn't really feel comfortable having them as team members.
With that said, I do like think the advice of reading Programming Pearls and Designing Data-Intensive Applications -- two books useful for the job at hand, and just your general knowledge of how systems work and how to approach problems. Leetcode, by contrast, is empty calories.
Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview
#145Besides the usual advice, this observation is very interesting: > Applying for senior engineering positions (>E4) in FANG companies is one of the best ways to get into them. This comment by a veteran senior engineer confirms to me that Facebook, just like most other FANGs, does a poor job of promoting from within. There are multiple comments to the same effect from many other FANG employees: It's much easier to get r…
I interviewed at FB and Amazon last summer and I asked how long people stay once they are hired. At both companies I was told the average tenure is about 1.5 - 2 years. That was a big yiiiiikes moment for me. People don't stick around long enough to get promoted.
Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview
#146How can anyone work at Facebooks nowadays and have a clear conscience. Is it just the salary? It is, isn't it? Just money. How depressing.
An effective way to change a culture is to participate in it.
Changing a company's culture is nearly impossible at a startup, let alone a behemoth like FB.
Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview
#147As someone who just went through the FB E5 interview process and got an offer, this is largely incorrect. Or, doesn't reflect how my E5 interviews goes and doesn't match up with what I've heard from friends. This is all anecdotal of course and based on personal experience.
1) DDIA is way too deep for E5, system design or product design. In general, the book is just too deep for any interview. It's a fantastic book but it's dense and too detailed for a 45 min interview.
2) The system design interview is largely around communication and thought process, not spouting techniques and flexing. I feel like candidates have a fundamental misunderstanding of what the system design round is and why it's used. It is not simply a time slot to rattle off design concepts.
3) The big elephant in the room are the coding questions. 2 med/hard per coding round, and you need to nail it all. Not only that, but expectations are higher. So no bugs, test all your code, perfect one shot solutions in optimal time complexity. This is very difficult to do under pressure.
4) At E5 level, I found the system design portion fairly easy. If you've been through the sys design interview before or currently work as a senior, it won't be a big deal. I think people are blindsided by it because they are trying to up level themselves from L4 or E4, and then hit the "senior wall".
5) Behavioral is really important. Unfortunate to not see this being mentioned.
tldr, E5 is hard because of the coding, not the system design. The system design at FB was similar to design questions and depth for all the major tech companies (MS, Amazon, Goog, Apple etc)
Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview
#148There are two interesting things in this post. The first is that a senior developer at Facebook believes every single senior developer looking for a role at Facebook can revise the same things. Clearly the author believes that Facebook are looking for programmers who fit a very specific mould, to the point that they're willing to go out in public and state exactly that. I'd argue that points to a massive monoculture…
I couldn't disagree more with your post. The author is basically just putting out a detailed study plan for passing an exam. If a doctor posted a plan for passing the medical boards would your first thought be "Wow, look at that massive medical monoculture problem!" That seems like a ridiculous stretch in my opinion. To your second point, I hear this all the time in threads about tech interviewing: "Tech interviews a…
> If a doctor posted a plan for passing the medical boards would your first thought be "Wow, look at that massive medical monoculture problem!" That seems like a ridiculous stretch in my opinion.
This analogy doesn't work. It's basically the final part of your education in that field (and others). If every hospital / medical center made you quit for a few months to study for their interviews when you switch jobs it would be an analogy. Oh we only hire people who can find a vein in 15 seconds under a suboptimal lighting situation.
Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
>in most cases doctors have many, many thousands of hours under their belt in training before still needing to study a ton to pass their boards The difference is that what the doctors put so much time into learning can actually be quite useful for their job. The vast majority of competitive coding stuff isn't. Interview procedures based around it completely fail to assess some of the most important abilities in softw…
My ex girlfriend is a pediatric cardiologist who recently passed her boards. When I talked to her about it, she was very much on the side that she wished she didn't have to study for it because it didn't have much to do with her job at all. She just wished she could spend her time getting better at the skills she actually used rather than a wide range of academic material that didn't matter to her day to day. Her fri…
Similarly, I spoke to a pharmacist recently, and they said the same thing: the board exams expected the person to know information about medication that was no longer even in use.
Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview
#150I'm not interested as I think it would be hypocritical and immoral for me to persue a job at Facebook. Considering Facebooks current issues I'd be interested how people would justify this career path to themselves.
It's like wanting to sign up for the UK armed forces in the middle of the Iraq war. Like, it's a really bad idea. What are your principle, are they summed up as "I want as much money as possible and who cares how"