Facebook senior software engineer interview

Fcbk doesn’t deserve to have devs working for them

Here's an honest answer

* spread of misinformation on the platform/genocide in Myanmar/election integrity - this to me is the scariest thing about FB, but also something the company is dealing with and working on and trying to get right. It's not an easy problem to solve either.

* Targeted ads - This really doesn't bother me. Tracking user interests/behavior and using it to serve ads they are way more likely to engage with, is creepy true, but also quite innovative and effective and the reason the company makes billions of dollars. It's hard for me to get worked up about showing users more effective ads. There are some interesting nuances around whether this should be opt in or opt out and giving users control over how their data is used. Some of this will be determined by laws which seems better to me then having it fall on individual companies. FB does give users control btw.

* Too much/not enough censorship - this topic is a complete shit show and no one agrees anyway on how much is or isn't enough. FB's stance is basically to remove hate speech and calls to violence and allowing anything else. I'm fine with that.

* buying out competitors like IG and What's App - it's normal for companies to do this and for the government to step in when it's too much

* Other misc. shady things - there's other things that come up from time to time. I agree that some of it is shady, but imo is standard for what you find in American capitalism: ruthless competition and cutting corners to get ahead as opposed to evil maliciousness towards users and subverting the law.

* Leetcode style interview questions - I have no problem with this whatsoever. The goal is not to ask difficult questions that trick candidates. It's to ask medium difficulty questions and hire people who can quickly and effectively solve them. Not everyone who fails the interview is bad, but the people who pass should be decent.

* Users getting addicted to FB and IG/it makes them unhappy - I don't have a strong opinion about this topic. I don't really use the products since they don't appeal to me. They do appeal to (a growing) many and I think it's a bit presumptuous to point to those people and say "but really it makes you unhappy." I'm open to studies and scholarship that say otherwise.

I'm not sure if I covered everything the OP had in mind, since they were not specific. Probably there are some other objectionable things I missed.

my experience in the industry of coding has driven home to huge points:

1. that each individual & each team has an enormous amount of leeway & personal responsibility. teams are vested with what power they take & how far they & their environment let them.

2. complexity is everywhere & typically to work, to produce, is to add complexity & create new ways for things to go bad. indeed part of what is most notable about FAANG companies is that they have colossal staffs- & notably many of their senior engineer ranks- working to manage & reduce complexity, by inventing continuous integration/deploy systems, by devising trackers for cyclocmatic code & cyclomatic data-dependency/data-access-pattern complexity, by creating more resilient infrastructure & new ways to administrate systems.

i fully agree that there is a huge opportunity cost. i think it's madness how focused & specific these interview courses are, what a set path they are on. but i also think it's been underspoken that learning algorithms & data-structures & less so systems are fairly core material to the industry, that these are basic truths that underpin every single thing we do. and i think the knowledge is acquireable and important.

and i think just as much, it's unsaid, culturally, a lot of my first point: that individuals in this industry have enormous liberties, that they are sent off to incredible & weird tasks, to go drag something or other back to the company. notably, it's just so so so so hard for a company to take responsibility for "it's" code, to re-integrate, to handle, the new complexity that gets dragged in to base, by each individual contributor. there are so few repeatable processes, so few really good ways for a company to systematically remember what any given thing is, how it works, why it works, what it does. code-bases are bits of the wild, collected from all over, so often from one or a couple of individual contributors who set forth on some expedition. even, yes, the juniors. hacking new tweaks, changes, sometimes it doesn't feel like big stuff, but to software engineer is to set out upon wild land, most every time.

the sociology of this is fascinating to me, the dynamic is incredibly strong, incredibly asymmetric in how much responsibility is given to the developer, how wild the tasks are, & the difficulty & crudeness with which companies step up to re-integrate, take in, take responsibility for, manage the work that gets done.

High stakes entry-exams have their own problems. Among many other issues, they measure peak performance, rather than sustained performance.

US college admissions have many problems, so don't hear me say they don't need reform, but you are also assuming that academics are the sole thing that college is about. It isn't, at least not in the US. US schools value many things beyond pure academics. Among them being leadership (whether or not you were class president is one such indicator), personal initiative, success against the odds and many other things.