181–190 of 524 posts
Besides 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…
> Most of these companies have solid internship programs, and almost all E3 (entry-level) positions are offered to returning interns.
The author is saying that getting an entry-level position without an internship is very difficult at these companies and so if you want to work at one, applying as a senior engineer is a much easier route.
FWIW, I work at one of those companies and have found senior roles and promotions to actually be pretty biased toward longtime employees
There 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…
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I worked at a company, not a FANG, but had interviews like a FANG. We had a solid team. But some of us believed we wouldn't be able to pass our own interviews.
isn't this what's happening at FANG companies: the gatekeepers (i.e. people giving interviews) have an incentive to not let people in too easily? This limits the pool of employees, and since what's rare is expensive, makes insiders more valuable? Also at FANG companies, interviewing feels (to me) like hazing that is unrelated to what the day-to-day job will be like. Some interviewers I had obviously had a very high o…
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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. It's more like an oncologist posting that every doctor needs to revise cancer treatments for a month before applying for a role in a hospital without realising that other doctors have spent 10 years specialising in different a…
there's are years of inefficient labor from students, residents, fellows, and junior doctors on procedures they'll never do again (because they relatively cheap)
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> That all makes sense for hiring people to work on big existing systems, but many of these large companies are also trying to innovate and build new products with smaller, more agile teams. Which innovation of Facebook are you describing? Instagram, WhatsApp, or the stories?
Not products in the typical sense, but these are some interesting technologies coming out of Facebook that I can list off the top of my head (many of which I have used personally): * https://engineering.fb.com/2014/06/10/web/open-sourcing-haxl... * https://osquery.io/ * https://rocksdb.org/ * https://fbinfer.com/ * https://flow.org/ * https://prepack.io/
Is it your suggestion that those kinds of applications do not require solid knowledge of a variety of different data structures and algorithms?
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Changing a company's culture is nearly impossible at a startup, let alone a behemoth like FB.
Google did just vote to unionize, so it's not impossible, but very difficult.
There 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…
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From the article it would appear that anyone with a computer science background and a decent amount of experience as an engineer should pass the technical test without the need to spend the whole month revising. If you don't have a computer science foundation it's probably a good idea to learn the basics anyway, rather than learning just to pass the interview.
The bar for Facebook is something like being able to solve two medium-difficulty problems in 45 minutes. If you want to test yourself, you could try these, which are popular questions: https://leetcode.com/problems/find-all-anagrams-in-a https://leetcode.com/problems/subarray-sum-equals-k/-string/ Note that it's not enough to present any solution - you need to present a solution that is efficient. Also, you should be…
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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…
"But why?" Because most people can't. And they want to make sure you can.