431–440 of 524 posts
As a person working in Facebook for 7 years I feel like this post is incorrectly portraying FB's process and culture: - First, Facebook avoids titles, so there's no such thing "senior software engineer". Levels are generally unknown by people so ICs get judged by their ideas, and not their title. - If there was such a thing as "senior" in Facebook, it's not starting at the E4 level. (If you look at levels.fyi and ali…
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Most people with 20 years of experience can't write basic code? Come on.
You must not have tried to hire a software engineer before. In a hiring cycle I encounter multiple "Senior Engineers" who can't write basic code. Fizzbuzz. Can't do it. Engineers should absolutely expect to write real code in an interview. It's preposterous to think that someone can claim to have 20 years experience writing code and then be offended to spend 20 minutes doing it in an interview.
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Most people with 20 years of experience can't write basic code? Come on.
We hired one who couldn't. He turned out to be more of a mentor/big vision/best practices guy. Which is probably OK to have one or two of those if you're a large enough org. But we had 3 devs. I think he gave some great advice (and looking back - still think so 12 years later), but it just wasn't what we needed at the time. The funny thing is, when we let him go (he knew it was coming - he wasn't blind to the problem…
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They also have to go to school for 10 years before they’re even allowed in the job market. I’ll take our sometimes silly interview processes over that.
>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 the…
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But as it stands I've interviewed many engineers with years of experience who couldn't competently program, and I'm talking about maybe a tad above FizzBuzz level proficiency. I've interviewed close to 400 developers over the past couple of decades, and I've not met many who can't code. Some are great, and some are clearly at the bottom end of the distribution, but most are just OK. They can get the job done, they ca…
I am not sure whether you have an incredibly good filtering system or have got incredibly lucky. I have interviewed similar numbers and have been repeatedly complimented on my ability to put people at ease, but have encountered exactly what the grandparent comment says. It really opened my eyes seeing so many with many years on their CV but struggling with (literal) fizzbuzz. This experience accords with most I have…
I've only been on the interviewer side a few times (roughly 10), but even then I've run into 2 candidates that couldn't code.
If interviewers are screening candidates for certain attributes (regardless of how well those attributes map to being good at the job) you should expect most candidates to lack those attributes. Candidates who have them get hired after a few interviews, candidates who don't have to do many more interviews to find a job (or get discouraged).
As a former FAANG coding interviewer, I would disagree with this. Use your strongest language: being visibly fluent in any language gives a much better impression than trying to stumble through in a language you're rusty or unfamiliar with. The interview is (meant to, anyway) focusing on your thinking process, logic and data structures, not the details of syntax.
I would avoid functional languages like Lisp or Haskell though, they're just too weird/different for most people and you risk coming off as an impractical idealist.
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'd argue that points to a massive monoculture problem at Facebook, but I'm massively anti-Facebook so I'm biased. I'm pretty sure that's the point. Massive enterprises like Facebook have no need for creative "outside the box" thinking anymore. They need dependable, solid developers with a standardized skillset that they can plug into a position like lego blocks, easily replaced whenever they burnout or stop toeing…
Thinking outside of the box is very much encouraged and more senior engineers are expected to come up or shape, lead and deliver projects.
FB is company where individual engineers could go and do any project they want - they can even invent it - if they believe that it will deliver big enough impact. After 1 year at FB you can switch team any time you like and your manager does not even need to know what you are working on (it's probably better if they know, as they could many times help you, but no one is micro managing you).
You are assessed every 6 months based on impact you deliver. Your manager supports you, but you need to drive it and deliver it.
Tooling/languages are standardised, but FB does not care whether you do know Hack, or JS. You can do interview in any language (if you are going for generic engineering role). So far at FB I have coded in 4 different languages and picked up all of them as I joined teams.
Even though FB is enterprise company, it feels like startup with great salary, benefits and more manageable work-life balance. Before FB I was 7 years in startups and I have worked longer hours, got paid much less and wasted more time.
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"But why?" Because most people can't. And they want to make sure you can.
If you can describe an acceptable algorithm with enough detail in words, you can code it. If some guy had a good employment history, maybe a GitHub with some examples of their skills and described an algorithm to me... Why would I doubt their ability to write it in code?
I wouldn't take that for granted. It's easy to gloss over details and edge cases when talking through an algorithm and it's not apparent until you actually write the code. Similar things happen when discussing things in meetings vs writing a formal document. I've interviewed plenty of people that were able to quickly come up with algorithms to solve a problem but really struggled to translate them into code.
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Your points are basically true across $MANGA as well. (Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, Google, Amazon) I think it’s more a symptom of interviewing being broken than just being a monoculture. They’re probably very related, though. Bad interview practices produce bad results, etc. Why is interviewing so broken? Why isn’t there something like certifications? Do things like unions address this? They seem to in construction, p…
> $MANGA as well. (Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, Google, Amazon) I must say this is a new acronym (backronym?) for me. Why do people insist on shoe-horning in Netflix in there? Yes, I'm aware without the N these acronyms can collapse into a more distasteful and off-topic term, but is that the only reason? I'm sure Netflix is a "wealthy" company with a competent engineering org, but surely they are nowhere near the scale…