Facebook senior software engineer interview • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#461

Post by permille42 » Thu, Jan 07, 2021, 4:33 AM UTC

addicted wrote: post #265

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…

1) This isn’t unique to FB. 2) The kind of interview being described has been critiqued by many people, many times on HN itself (I am definitely one of those). The problem is that there are no good alternatives. One suggested alternative, take home exercises, became a mess because a lot of companies, and individuals at companies, started treating them as free labor. Beyond that, they need to be more complex to the po…

There are plenty of good alternatives. One is: Talk to the fucking candidate and ask them about the things they have done over the course of their career. Have them explain something you don't know about yourself and see how they do.

The key thing here is you need senior engineers conducting the interviews to be able to judge properly, not the 3-4 yr out of college monkeys that Facebook uses to interview.

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#462

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Thu, Jan 07, 2021, 4:44 AM UTC

BowBun wrote: post #63

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…

I tend to be on your side of the fence but I have to nitpick your argument: At these companies, algorithms and the basics are fundamentally important. Because you tend to work on tiny parts of a massive whole, there is no tolerance for cowboy-coding and not following best-practices. IMO the interviews test that you can fall in line and follow the patterns that have been in place for decades. With regards to using API…

> At these companies, algorithms and the basics are fundamentally important. Because you tend to work on tiny parts of a massive whole, there is no tolerance for cowboy-coding and not following best-practices. IMO the interviews test that you can fall in line and follow the patterns that have been in place for decades.

... have they gotten a lot better since 2015?

https://www.darkcoding.net/software/facebooks-code-quality-p...

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#463

Post by appletrotter » Thu, Jan 07, 2021, 4:45 AM UTC

Retric wrote: post #452

barnacled wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It really is about interviewing skills. I noticed a strong trend over time that the people I interviewed kept doing better. You need to engage with people without letting things get confrontational. The best advice I can give is look at how entertainers get random audience members to relax and engage in front of huge audiences. Many people lock up in such situations and can barely say their own name, yet with the rig…

> and have been repeatedly complimented on my ability to put people at ease

You calling them a liar eh?

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#464

Post by thereare5lights » Thu, Jan 07, 2021, 4:50 AM UTC

barnacled wrote: post #407

onion2k wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Most people are really terrible at interviewing. And why are we surprised? It's not a skill many cultivate.

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#465

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 07, 2021, 4:51 AM UTC

Retric wrote: post #452

barnacled wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It really is about interviewing skills. I noticed a strong trend over time that the people I interviewed kept doing better. You need to engage with people without letting things get confrontational. The best advice I can give is look at how entertainers get random audience members to relax and engage in front of huge audiences. Many people lock up in such situations and can barely say their own name, yet with the rig…

[deleted]

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#466

Post by amazoniananon » Thu, Jan 07, 2021, 5:04 AM UTC

gotosleep wrote: post #357

amazoniananon wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are very basic/generalist things, not a specific mould. Refreshing your skills here and making sure you're comfortable with everything on this list will help you be confident that you can pretty much do the kinds of work available to you as a senior engineer. And if you are lacking in any of these, it almost certainly will show up when you're trying to function in the role. I run into this every day with entry…

"if you did get hired for this role and managed to keep it, you'll be a master at this stuff within a couple of years." I wholeheartedly disagree. I have a total of 14 years of experience. I've been at Google for the past 6 years. I'm an L5 (Senior Engineer) and I get good performance reviews. I interview candidates on a fairly regular basis on behalf of Google. I am fully confident that if I had to re-interview for…

> these algorithm quizzes have nothing at all to do with our job

There are no algorithm quizzes here, and it's not saying to prep for one. It says you should have a good grasp on these: arrays, heaps, linked lists, searching, etc. And it provides quality references for refreshing that knowledge and for getting practice thinking and speaking about them in human language instead of internal abstract thought. I think we agree that if you are in a senior engineering role, I don't necessarily care if you can implement a linked list in an interview time slot, but I sure as heck care that you know how it's different from an array, how it generally functions, when you would use it, in what situations alternatives might be better, and so on. When and why would you use a linear search instead of a binary search, are you aware of how hashes actually work and that hash collisions may occur and need to be handled in some way, can you identify that a particular problem is best solved by recursion or by dynamic programming even if you can't whip up a functional solution in an hour, etc, etc. Some interview candidates literally can't tell you why you would use a linked list instead of an array - it's just an ordered collection to them. That's what this is about - it's not about quizzes, its about fundamentals. These are what our systems are made of and understanding them is valuable to do the work we do.

And aside from data structures and algorithms and being able to talk and reason about them, I also need to see actual code of some kind that solves an actual problem in this interview, with appropriate questions around the presented ambiguity as well as be able to talk about its trade-offs, potential improvements, testability, maintainability observability, and so on. But these are not necessarily anything like an algorithm quiz

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#467

Post by binarytox1n » Thu, Jan 07, 2021, 5:10 AM UTC

cutemonster wrote: post #432

binarytox1n wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do they react when they fail Fizzbuzz?

I make a judgement call - either I end the interview immediately or skip most of the rest of the interview, let them think they made it all the way through the interview and say that we will get back to them with a decision later. When I end it immediately they usually take it badly but these are times that I just can’t justify wasting any more time on them. The bad reactions run the normal gamut of bad human reactions: angry, sad, indifferent, humor, etc.

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#468

Post by dboreham » Thu, Jan 07, 2021, 5:14 AM UTC

vishnugupta wrote: post #274

gamerDude wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> just wished she could spend her time getting better at the skills she actually used I can so relate to this when I look back at 4 years I spent studying for a CS degree. The first year had just 3 subjects out of 17 that had something to do with CS. The rest were wildly off the mark. Like engineering drawing, metal workshop, and what not. The second year was slightly better but just. It was crammed with electronics;…

Engineering drawing is character building though.

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#469

Post by cratermoon » Thu, Jan 07, 2021, 6:05 AM UTC

caymanjim wrote: post #375

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, I'm not sure where this "10 years" is coming from. I know many/most "senior" developers who reached that level long before 10 years out of university. Secondly, programming doesn't have a standard licensure process like medicine. If it did, I think a lot of these kinds of interviews that companies do would not be necessary. But as it stands I've interviewed many engineers with years of experience who co…

> First of all, I'm not sure where this "10 years" is coming from. I know many/most "senior" developers who reached that level long before 10 years out of university. That's because it's a near-meaningless title that has been watered down. Everyone is a "senior" now by their second year working.

As of 2-4 years ago, the number of programmers working in the industry was doubling every 5 years. That might not seem relevant until you realize that it means half of all programmers have less than 5 years experience. If you have 10 years in the industry, you're more senior than 75% of your co-workers.

That's why anyone with 5 years on the job is considered "senior", even though most in most professions you're just getting out of the entry level after 5 years.

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#470

Post by B-Con » Thu, Jan 07, 2021, 6:08 AM UTC

Aunche wrote: post #215

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After 20 years in software, I had a phone interview with an Amazon guy who sounded half my age (at most). Asked me to write some kind of function to do something, sort some stuff or some such. I described verbally how I would do it, almost line by line, in pseudo-code. He said "I need you to write it out in [some language]". I said "But why? I just told you how I'd do it." But he needed me to literally write the code…

Companies like Amazon have standardized procedures for interviews. At the company I work for, the person interviewing isn't going to be the same person who hires you, so they need more data that just the interviewer's notes. Also, deviating from the standard procedure opens up the effect of unconscious bias.

This is the correct answer. The interviewer is only the to gather data, the hiring committee makes the decision and they need concrete days to look at. "Take my word for it" doesn't fly as an interviewer.