Facebook senior software engineer interview

Post by donatj » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 9:41 PM UTC

paxys wrote: post #273

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…

If it's a front-end position then that makes sense, considering there is really no alternative to JavaScript (or rather wasn't 10 years ago).

Post by mbbutler » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 9:50 PM UTC

gamerDude wrote: post #68

logicchains wrote: post #17

Earlier 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…

Post by waynesonfire » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 9:58 PM UTC

Post by Hydraulix989 » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 9:59 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.

Post by gcristofol » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 10:04 PM UTC

francisofascii wrote: post #109

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…

This may be an unpopular opinion, but I like how it is very objective, measurable, and somewhat specific. If I get fired and suddenly have my days free, I can simply study algorithms and leetcode and get a job elsewhere. It seems easier than worrying about everything else that could be asked during an interview.