41–50 of 174 posts
Does facebook still use PHP?
Yes, if the .php extensions on most of the URLs is any indication.
Never interviewed at Facebook but have been offered roles at similarly hard to get places. Though I am working at my own startup now, the absurdness of the interviewing process at majority of such places confounds me. In short, I can't cope up with them well without going through quite a few glassdoor type questions of that respective company. And partially it is because most interviewers already have a set of soluti…
The thing that really bothers me about these postings is the advice that you should 'prep'. Conceivably, many applicants will already have a job that requires them to code 8 hours a day. But somehow, the skills required to pass their interview are so out of line with what a programmer does day to day, that extracurricular studying is required. It would suggest that the interview itself selects for mostly irrelevant s…
I'm particularly curious as someone who only did a bit of CS in school and became a full time programmer from work I did as a hobbyist.
And if the answer is "yes, your work has nothing to do with the kind of work we do at Facebook, Google, etc." it's not so much that I'm appalled but actually even more curious about the jobs at those companies than I am now.
I hope this doesn't sound facetious, but what I hear over and over again is that places like Facebook have difficult technical interviews that are algorithm focused to create more false negatives than false positives because they work on hard problems. What are some concrete examples of hard problems tech companies face that require novel solutions and why are algorithms problems the best way to find the people quali…
one I was given in an interview: You're working on the front-end development for a chatting website. Each conversation gets it's own 100x200px div and they are placed on the screen such that two conversation windows are never intersecting. We want to display a new conversation window, write an algorithm to determine where a conversation can be placed such that it does not overlap with any current conversations. Assum…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was thinking of applying, but... is it really 70 hours a week? Because that's not going to fly with me. I don't do more than 45 as a worst-case average no matter who the employer is.
I don't know many Facebook employees, and I don't know any in California, but 40-45 is what I hear, not 70. I don't know if that's representative of what a normal employee does, but 70 sounds implausible.
Never interviewed at Facebook but have been offered roles at similarly hard to get places. Though I am working at my own startup now, the absurdness of the interviewing process at majority of such places confounds me. In short, I can't cope up with them well without going through quite a few glassdoor type questions of that respective company. And partially it is because most interviewers already have a set of soluti…
The thing that really bothers me about these postings is the advice that you should 'prep'. Conceivably, many applicants will already have a job that requires them to code 8 hours a day. But somehow, the skills required to pass their interview are so out of line with what a programmer does day to day, that extracurricular studying is required. It would suggest that the interview itself selects for mostly irrelevant s…
Funny that this got brought on the Facebook thread. Though I never applied at FB, I have 'mentored' two people who made it through the process. Mentoring as in, helped them make sense (and see the general pattern) of the solutions which they saw online but could not appreciate/ understand on their own. Though I guess they had lesser trouble regurgitating the solutions in the interviews.
Still, it seems like rather run-of-the-mill process. It will certainly filter out the bad, but you may miss some very good workers who work in different ways. Facebook still seems to be totally focused on code problems, and doesn't even mention if what you've already built is important.
In my opinion, stuff that someone has made should probably be considered the most important thing by miles. It doesn't have to be open-source code, but that certainly helps.
Second most important is communication skills, especially how well they can explain things they have worked on.
From this post, Facebook seems more interested in making sure developer can re-re-re-implement merge-bubble sort-reduce, I'm sure while occasionally printing "Buzz". I understand why these tests can be necessary for a lot of people[1], but I imagine the caliber of people that get past screening at Facebook aren't of that type.
~~~
The most delightful interview I ever had (I was being interviewed) was one where the development team didn't even ask me any general programming questions. They took what I had written as fulfilling that pass, and went straight into several conversations with different developers about the ways we go about making libraries. They asked me to talk about decision making process and how I might explain or advocate for various concepts. I'd like to think if they had any suspicions they might have switched gears to a FizzBuzz level, but I can't know for sure.
These talks got very in depth, and whiteboard-writing was had, but at no time did they ask a programming question that wasn't rooted in the concrete. It was always directed: "How did you...?" "How might we...?" "Didn't you run into problems with...?"
Never did they ask me to implement a common algorithm, which feels silly. I can't remember all of them (or even most of them), and if I needed to in the course of my work I'd consult Professor Wikipedia long before I touch my own corruptible memory. Never did they ask me to implement an obscure algorithm, which popular companies seem to enjoy but I imagine filters out a lot of good candidates who happen to have spent time knowing the wrong things. I do not understand why obscura in itself might impress.
Instead, they had me make worthwhile claims about (my or other's) code and then prove them.
Then they showed me what each of them was working on, ensuring there was two-way discussion on each. They showed me problems they were having, what they were doing, and asked my opinion. They showed me bugs, and we sat down and set breakpoints, talked it over and stepped through until the issue was resolved.
This process lasted two days, and the entire time I was delighted. They did an incredible job of making me feel accepted as a fellow professional developer. I ended up not taking the job for personal reasons, but the entire process and people involved were all wonderful.
(The company was Sencha).
[1] Jeff Atwood's "Why Can't Programmers.. Program?" has a good discussion on that http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/why-cant-programmer...
I hope this doesn't sound facetious, but what I hear over and over again is that places like Facebook have difficult technical interviews that are algorithm focused to create more false negatives than false positives because they work on hard problems. What are some concrete examples of hard problems tech companies face that require novel solutions and why are algorithms problems the best way to find the people quali…
I also guess that when you run the largest online community out there you might run into problems that you can't find the answer to on stack overflow. Even if these are not the majority of problems you face day to day there's an advantage to having staff on-site who have a hope of solving them.
I interviewed at Facebook (a while ago - they were still on University Ave). This article is a pretty accurate description of the interview process that I remember, but could apply equally well to technical interviews most places. The "fit" category is fairly vague, but a better description of it (and what I think about when interviewing candidates) is "how would I feel if I had to stay late fixing a live site issue…
I hope this doesn't sound facetious, but what I hear over and over again is that places like Facebook have difficult technical interviews that are algorithm focused to create more false negatives than false positives because they work on hard problems. What are some concrete examples of hard problems tech companies face that require novel solutions and why are algorithms problems the best way to find the people quali…
one I was given in an interview: You're working on the front-end development for a chatting website. Each conversation gets it's own 100x200px div and they are placed on the screen such that two conversation windows are never intersecting. We want to display a new conversation window, write an algorithm to determine where a conversation can be placed such that it does not overlap with any current conversations. Assum…
Or is the problem different? For example you already have some arbitrary number of windows already displayed at arbitrary locations that you cannot move?