Facebook senior software engineer interview • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#331

Post by MajorBee » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 7:19 PM UTC

_Understated_ wrote: post #288

jyu wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coding a good solution is necessary but not sufficient to pass an interview. Maybe you asked too many questions or not enough, maybe you solved the problem too slowly. Interviewers for better or worse look for specific signals that clue them into your being a good coworker. It's why even if you're a good programmer you may need to apply multiple times before the right set of interviewers grant you admission into thei…

> It's why even if you're a good programmer you may need to apply multiple times before the right set of interviewers grant you admission into their club. That would imply to me that their interview process is fundamentally broken.

It could also imply that they simply get more good applications than they need. Everyone and their grandma seems to want to work for Big N, after all.

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#332

Post by justapassenger » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 7:19 PM UTC

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #317

justapassenger wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have 20 years of experience myself, and I've interviewed and worked with a lot of people with same experience that couldn't code properly (and some of them were actually good engineers). Yes, they'd describe roughly how something should work, but the actual implementation would be super buggy, ignoring any corner cases, etc. People who stopped doing any hands on work more than a decade ago, and are just coasting wi…

I never stated that I felt "insulted". You're just projecting that, maybe based on bad experiences you have had. There's an old saying: a job interview is a two-way street. You are interviewing them (or should be) every bit as much as they are you. If the applicant asks a basic question about the position, the interviewer has a duty to either answer the question or say "I'm not sure what role this is for; I've just b…

Original comment started by stating your many years of experience and noting that interviewer was much younger. Then complains about being asked to do coding. And then, based on just those two, saying that you know you'd be unhappy working with people like him.

Amazon isn't great environment in most of the pockets of the company (haven't worked there, but worked with a lot of people who came from there), so it's quite possible that you "dodged the bullet".

But only when pressed, you start to complain how interviewer is immature, arrogant, rigid. That's not what you originally stated - you had issues with an interviewer age and being asked to do coding. I'm not trying to defend the interviewer - it's very possible that they were bad interviewers - big tech companies push people early to start interviewing. But things that you complained about initially make it sound like you maybe also not a very pleasant candidate to work with, that comes into the interview with a lot of bias.

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#333

Post by dnautics » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 7:20 PM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #2

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…

I (as a senior) had a rather bad experience interviewing with Facebook; I was mostly interested in interviewing for whatsapp, the recruiter went and put me in front of someone not at whatsapp, I programmed in an erlang-vm language, so the interviewer was already confused by the code I was writing.

The interview was conducted over coderpad, and at the outset, the interviewer asked if I was familiar with it (I was; I've conducted interviews over coderpad), and I wasted a lot of time commenting out the interviewer's cut and paste instructions and writing out the tests, because when I wanted to actually test out my code, to my surprise, execution was disabled!! I didn't even know that was an option in coderpad.

So, basically one of the key tools I use in my day-to-day coding workflow was kneecapped. As a result I wasn't able to run the quick tests I had written, and I had mixed up two similar algorithms in the implementation, but not in the tests. I would have noticed this IMMEDIATELY if I could have run my code! Needless to say I failed the interview at the first stage.

Oh well. I probably prefer working at startups anyways (I landed at one in the domain I wanted to be in, working in the language I prefer, get paid reasonably well, and have sizable equity in a company that has a good shot at high upside in a short timeframe).

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#334

Post by orangepudding » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 7:20 PM UTC

conorh wrote: post #20

Every 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…

It's sad but yeah it's true that you have to prepare for interviews. The reality is that the breadth of topics that you have to have good knowledge on is larger than the scope of work you've probably been working on in your current job.

I had work at a FANG before, but after a few years doing a startup, I had to go over and learn topics that I had no understanding on to get good offers again. I summarized what I felt were useful tactics for prepping system design interviews here (https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/kd13sx/s...) and a summary on a list of core topics I put together here (http://gum.co/sysdesign).

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#335

Post by patrickserrano » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 7:22 PM UTC

Maybe it's imposter syndrome, but it often feels like these interviews were designed to discourage self-taught developers ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#336

Post by spoonjim » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 7:22 PM UTC

driverdan wrote: post #213

spoonjim wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FB pays astronomically well. You don’t have to work there, but if you do, this is what you have to do. Saying that it creates a “monoculture” is like saying that soccer teams only hiring people who can run this fast, jump this high, and kick the ball this hard get to be on the team. Sure, they might miss the occasional great talent who is unathletic but has some great gift for the game, but it’s not a bad set of hiri…

This is a poor analogy. It's like making a soccer / football player answer a test on the history of the sport, how the ball is made, the geometry involved in kicking the ball, the mesh size of the goal net, etc. There may be some relevance but in the end if they're a good player none of that matters. You'd be testing the wrong things to know if they're a good player.

I'm sure it's not optimal. But it's worked for Facebook very well so far. Why would they change? They don't need every talented developer under the sun. They just need a large group of developers who can do the work, and a small group of developers who can push the envelope on the most cutting edge stuff.

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#337

Post by rglullis » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 7:23 PM UTC

paxys wrote: post #266

LandR wrote: post #30

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.

Not everyone follows American politics and watches sensationalized American news media all day. Facebook is a great place to work, has some of the best tech in the industry and its products have done a lot of good for the world, especially in developing countries.

I really wonder what good they have done. All of their initiatives are self-serving. And at the end of the day, no amount of good they do will ever make up for all the damage they cause to their users. I am not even talking about the American politics, just the amount of psyops tricks to get people engaged and addicted to the platform, manipulation of one's sense of wellbeing, the social anxiety they cause. They make Big Tobacco look like saints.

As for "being a great place to work" or "the tech": how much of soul-less drone one has to be to look at all this shit and still think "but the tech is cool and they pay really well!"?

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#338

Post by sjg007 » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 7:24 PM UTC

donatj wrote: post #51

> The big tech companies will not get pedantic on the language that you decide to use in your interviews. Ten+ years ago, but I received an email minutes before my second phone interview with Facebook that they were passing on me for not being adept enough with JavaScript. I was supposed to be going over a take home project with the team on that call. They never even saw the project I’d spent the entire weekend on, a…

They passed on the WhatsApp guy too and that cost FB $20 billion. So moral of the story is start a startup!

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#339

Post by closeparen » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 7:26 PM UTC

robjan wrote: post #12

onion2k wrote: post #2

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…

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.

Algorithms was one of 18 courses in my CS major.

You want to check my computer science background, ask me about: regular languages, LR0 grammars, interpreters, compilers, system calls, threads, virtual memory, concurrency control, TCP, consensus protocols, raytracing, scene segmentation, sensor fusion, database indexes, block cipher padding schemes, etc.

But no one cares about the other 17 courses, they just want me to have internalized a crazy level of detail on one in particular, as if I had studied nothing else for 4 years.

The performance problems I've been called on to solve, I solved by having a vague idea of what's going on at the OS and network level, something that apparently makes me a wizard at a company that allegedly selects for "CS fundamentals."

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#340

Post by jac241 » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 7:27 PM UTC

_qulr wrote: post #96

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The US Medical Licensing Examination is mainly for medical students not "senior" physicians, and the pass rate is extremely high for U.S. M.D. medical school graduates, over 90%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Medical_Licensin... In other words, it's not a standard job interview technique for doctors, it's a one-time requirement for licensing. The other difference of course is that doctors are legally pe…

There are specialty board exams that you take once you're done with residency. Some are written exams. Surgical specialties do oral board exams where they present cases to you and question you on management. Pass rates for those are not as high. Many specialty boards make you take recertification exams every x number of years.