Facebook senior software engineer interview

For nearly 2 decades, vi(m) (or a vim emulator or integration layer) has been my daily editor.

I recently had an interview where I had to use some remote collaborative web application and it was genuinely a horrible experience. The main interviewer (lead for the team I was applying for) was visibly annoyed with me because, for whatever stupid reason, some of the keyboard shortcuts he kept trying to bark at me, as I was working through some truly asinine leetcode-style questions, for things like block indentation were not working on my end and I had to manually tab multiple lines, etc...

The entire editing experience threw me really hard and was so distracting that I was fumbling what would've otherwise been trivial algorithm questions for me. Despite my 15 years of professional experience and a deep understanding of their tech stack (which, of course, was not a main discussion point at any stage of my interview process -- one of many red flags for me), if you had watched this you'd have thought I barely know how to write code.

I don't know what the answer is here but I have decided, and thankfully I have the privilege of making this decision, that I am done interviewing for a while.

Imagine studying for an interview. Not about the company or its products, but bloody algorithm textbooks.

1) This isn’t unique to FB. 2) The kind of interview being described has been critiqued by many people, many times on HN itself (I am definitely one of those). The problem is that there are no good alternatives. One suggested alternative, take home exercises, became a mess because a lot of companies, and individuals at companies, started treating them as free labor. Beyond that, they need to be more complex to the point that an interviewee is doing actual work. 3) The best way to look at these interviews for senior engineers is them testing your ability to learn something “new” at a very fundamental level. It’s the equivalent of them selecting people based on their success in a badminton tournament. You will most likely need to pick up the game and it doesn’t have much to do with your day to day job, but it does say a lot about your ability to pick up new skills/tech ologies. The difference is that these interviews, unlike a game of badminton, actually have something to do with your job.

To be honest, it’s not ideal, and I particularly hate it because I find it hard to find time to study and prepare when I have a family that I don’t want to neglect, and also a full time job that i would find immoral to take time away from. But it’s simultaneously hard to find better alternatives.

>They also have to go to school for 10 years before they’re even allowed in the job market.

Not to mention that during that time they are accruing loans in insane amounts (we are talking about $200-300k) and get worked in insane shifts (24-36 hour shifts are not unheard of during residency rotations).

Oh, and they don't get paid at all until they start residency rotations which is AFTER 4 years of med school, and their pay during residency is on the order of $30k-50k for what effectively amounts to 80-100 hours a week. Mind you, that's on top of the fact that in the US, you only enter a med school after you already got a college degree. So you enter a med school at the age of 23.

I have respect for the doctors, but I definitely do not envy their position. Their real work doesn't even start until their 30s, at which point they are already really deep in student loan debt. Of course it is manageable, since they get paid handsomely. But their work-life balance and the entire process where you start your "real work" after the age of 30 with $200-300k in loans, at that point, isn't something that a lot of people consider when they think "those doctors are having it nice."

It isn't even a second thought to me that I would much much rather study for interviews every single time i switch a job as a software engineer than deal with what doctors deal. And that's not even mentioning that studying for a typical software dev interview is absolutely nothing compared to the studying that med school students have to do in order to pass their board exams.

> 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.

My bitterness comes from the fact that the interview process does not reflect what happens in day-to-day work. If I had to invert a n-ary tree, I would google how to do that, which I can't do during the interview.

> Once you go through and understand a few hundred coding challenges, things start to repeat themselves and then it just takes practice and consistency.

Assuming you spend about an hour to solve and understand a given coding challenge, that's a couple of hundred hours. Assuming an hour a day, that's about 3 months for 100 questions. That's not a trivial amount of prep.

>Personally, I find coding challenges fun and even quite enjoyable at times, so I don’t see why it’s a waste of time to get good at them.

Personally, I would prefer to spend that time enjoying my life. Whatever floats your boat.