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Facebook senior software engineer interview

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Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#441

Post by derangedHorse »

myhf wrote: post #330
hpux wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't necessarily agree with your observation. The issue here is that companies like Facebook hire a ton of entry-level (E3) engineers each year that come from their intern pool. Although many of them get promoted, not everyone can pass the bar. The need for more senior engineers is persistent in the company. Another thing to mention is that typically there is no headcount for E3 engineers at Facebook (besides retu…

What do you mean "pass the bar"? Promotion is a process of supporting and grooming someone for advancement once they have been selected by the promoter. There is no bar to pass.

What companies do you know work this way? Most of the FAANG companies I know only promote you once they think you’ve met that level of proficiency (not to groom you into the position later)

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#442

Post by derangedHorse »

mingfli wrote: post #424
sj3k wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed at FB and Amazon last summer and I asked how long people stay once they are hired. At both companies I was told the average tenure is about 1.5 - 2 years. That was a big yiiiiikes moment for me. People don't stick around long enough to get promoted.

IMO this is the wrong metric to look at. Any company that has experienced hyper growth (like FB or Amazon) will see very low average tenures simply because of math. The right metric is avg tenure at time of attrition.

Typically when tenure is mentioned, it’s only referring to the people who were hired and left (not people who are still working)

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#443

Post by permille42 »

Been there. Done that. Fuck Facebook.

They focused way too much on "college mentality" skills and zero on long term knowledge or experience with developing software in the field.

They also didn't ask jack shit about my past experiences.

Basically Facebook doesn't care about hiring specialists. They just want generic robots who will do their bidding.

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#444

Post by permille42 »

fatnoah wrote: post #230
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…

>Secondly, the author believes that senior developers, who likely have 10+ years under their belt if they're senior, need to spend a solid month revising in order to be successful landing a role there. FWIW, I joined FB at 20 YOE and spent about 3 hours on Leetcode problems just to get my mind back to being able to handle "stupid computer" tricks. Array manipulation, algorithm cleverness, etc. are things that I hadn'…

I had the same experience. They only asked about things I haven't focused on or cared about in over 20 years.

The person on the other side of the design interview also seemed very inexperienced and wasn't able to follow things that would be obvious and simple to anyone who has actually done system architecture.

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#445

Post by permille42 »

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.

Wrong. If you are a serious Software Engineer with 15+ years of experience you will easily fail their stupid interview process.

Why? Because most of the people on the loop have far less experience than you. They aren't any good at measuring those who are truly skilled and are just looking for clones of themselves that are happy to reinvent the wheel constantly.

The basics aren't really crucial to developing most software. Not the way Faceboook is testing them at least. They want you to spout off the typical college explanations for things you do in just a call to a library.

No serious systems developer gives a shit about how to implement sort these days. It's a waste of time.

The only way to measure the value and experience of senior developers reasonably is to have in depth discussions about their experiences. Using college type tests is just absurd and idiotic.

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#446

Post by sombremesa »

wanderer2323 wrote: post #309
Uberphallus wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kind of agree with your cynicism, but I'm partial due to having been refused by Facebook, twice. The first time I made the mistake of using Python (because of its whiteboard value) while not being proficient in it. They really didn't like me Googling some basic stuff. The second time I still used Python, but had 5 years experience using it behind. Can't be objective but it was probably the best interview I've ever…

There is this weird meme that using Python is beneficial during interviewing -- you mention it, the OP mentions it, I have experienced it myself and seen friends mention it. I don't know how or why this meme infects people; in my interview experience (MSFT, Google, Oracle, FB, Amazon, other smaller places) nobody ever batted an eyelid on me using C#. My advice would be to only use a language you know best, as long as…

It took me 1 second to think that Python has divmod built-in whereas you must import Math in C# to use DivRem. It's just little things like that - as well as boilerplate - that really makes a difference in these interviews. How many of these interviews resulted in a job offer? I disagree with eyelid-batting being the new success metric.

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#447

Post by permille42 »

dnautics wrote: post #333
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'v…

"Hey are you experienced with coderpad?" "No obviously I have never encountered coderpad in my 20+ years of writing software and will have a hard time using a simple online text editor." Facebook interviewers are such insulting morons to senior engineers.

I agree that actually running code, seeing the errors and fixing them in like 10 seconds is a common behavior amongst those of us who have been coding for ages. One can write code that works without doing that but it is a drag and wastes time.

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#448

Post by deegles »

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.

You really think a professional football player wouldn't know tons of random trivia about their sport? They probably could spend hours talking about the various pros/cons of different cleats...

Though I guess it's technically not necessary to know those things, I would be surprised that someone would put in the work necessary to succeed without being at least a bit interested in the details.

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#449

Post by musicale »

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…

> Secondly, the author believes that senior developers, who likely have 10+ years under their belt if they're senior, need to spend a solid month revising in order to be successful landing a role there

As others have noted, the same seems to be true of a number of other computing companies: the "technical interview" is a sort of qualifying examination (largely focused on undergraduate algorithms/algorithm puzzles/leetcode type problems) that is unrelated to the actual work.

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#450

Post by [deleted] »

lrossi wrote: post #132
xdavidliu wrote: post #111

> Day 12 — CLRS (ch 22, 23, 24, 25, 26) > When studying CLRS or PP, it’s essential to solve the exercises at the end of each chapter. I spent the last 2-3 weeks of 2020 going through these exact chapters, 22-26 (solving every exercise and problem) and it took me about 15 hours a day. Toward the end of chapter 26, it got extremely difficult (Goldberg and Tarjan's push relabel algorithm for max flow).

The suggested schedule is ridiculous, and I am not convinced it’s a good way for preparing for the interview. Still, the author didn’t say that he actually got the job.

[deleted]
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