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Facebook senior software engineer interview

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Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#61

Post by krooj »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #42

Facebook is pure self-parody at this point. This post is tragic comedy with no practical value besides entertainment. Anyone pursuing job options following advice like this has a severe problem with lack of self-esteem and capacity for independent thought.

100%. There’s an assumption in articles like this that you even want to work for said FAANG company. Additionally, these posts assume a one-way interview process, which is a sure fire way to end up places you don’t want to be. Jump through all the hoops like a good little show pony, then maybe if you’re good enough, you get an offer and... what? Congrats, now you work for a terrible organization at a level where you’ll never be able to affect real change - you’re a literal cog. Bravo.

Do the research and learning out of a genuine kernel of curiosity and self-betterment, not to whore yourself out to some corporation.

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#62

Post by wojciii »

gonzo41 wrote: post #55
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…

It is a proxy or how good you are at other development tasks. I think it's a bad proxy. Mostly because I've read and studied CLRS at school. And I don't use the fun parts much in the wild. I'm also not expected to be able to recall things that you can look up. One 'slightly' shameful things I noted about myself reading that list of system design interview questions is that I actually don't use most of those systems o…

Hmm.. this is how I got hired last year. I told the employer that I wanted to test them and to get me a short term project we could use to determine if company/me are a good match.

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#63

Post by BowBun »

logicchains wrote: post #17
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't disagree more with your post. The author is basically just putting out a detailed study plan for passing an exam. If a doctor posted a plan for passing the medical boards would your first thought be "Wow, look at that massive medical monoculture problem!" That seems like a ridiculous stretch in my opinion. To your second point, I hear this all the time in threads about tech interviewing: "Tech interviews a…

>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 design as something that is not assessed: System design questions do test this. Also at a company like FB, there's a handful of people designing APIs that are at the top of the pyramid, and even then long-standing conventions around API design at those companies will short-circuit the need for most devs to think about how to organize and name their endpoints.

At my small startup where most of us write an API endpoint, it's important to know. For a UI dev or someone optimizing DB lookups at massive software companies, API design is not something that needs to be tested.

Personally I can admit to feeling frustrated that passing these types of interviews is not my forte. It sucks that I would have to study for weeks to not flop these interviews even though I consider myself a good software engineer. But that doesn't 100% invalidate their interview process.

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#64

Post by hocuspocus »

ajg360 wrote: post #33

I've been programming professionally for 12+ years. I haven't had a need to look at CLRS since I took my graduate (!!!) algorithms course in college. I don't work in FAANG, but I am a senior developer in another industry. It would take me way more than two and a half weeks to work through all of the problem sets in CLRS; two and a half weeks is more for someone who is a year or two out of college. I don't think being…

I don't think many people who got a job at these companies used CLRS to prepare for the interviews. At least not the ones I know. There's a reason leetcode is so popular. In my own experience you really need to know how to solve the typical easy/medium questions quickly, interviewers themselves don't really want to ask hard questions. The infamous CTCI covers them, EPI is better from what I've heard.

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#65

Post by blisterpeanuts »

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…

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 out, as though I couldn't easily copy-and-paste something for him. I thanked him and hung up. All I learned from that encounter is that I'd be very unhappy working with people like him. Bullet dodged. Sure, I use my knowledge of algorithms, and I frequently look such things up on StackOverflow and improve my knowledge; we all do. But these interviews seem designed to filter out experienced, pragmatic programmers and just bring in more cookie-cutter software engineering BS/MS recent grads who speak their language. A far cry from the startup environment that most of these companies began as!

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#66

Post by lrvick »

LandR wrote: post #30

How can anyone work at Facebooks nowadays and have a clear conscience. Is it just the salary? It is, isn't it? Just money. How depressing.

I know multiple people that have taken jobs at Facebook in recent years that feel it is a net negative in the world but could not resist the paycheck and justify it by committing to either by work hard as user advocates from the inside, or just finding open source work that doesn't directly exploit users to drain their resources on.

I for one have taken interviews at Facebook with 0 intention of working for them just because they have a tough process and it is good practice. Wasting some of the time and resources of an organization that inherently evil also makes the world that much better.

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#67

Post by almog »

grumple wrote: post #25

CLRS is over 1000 very dense pages. I assume the author just did a fairly casual reading and didn't work through many problems. Even still, this is a full month of study just for the interview process, and little of this sticks unless you practice it. This basically says to me that big companies just want to hire new grads or people who have copious amounts of free time to waste on studying, or perhaps enough wealth…

> CLRS is over 1000 very dense pages. I assume the author just did a fairly casual reading and didn't work through many problems.

When I saw his day to day plan include things like chapters 22-26 of CLRS, I thought the same and casual might be an understatement unless he has read this book multiple times already.

DDIA was by far the preparation reading I've enjoyed the most. I'm currently reading it again. It is so eloquent and fun to read but other than just the fact that internalizing these topics to a level where one can feel comfortable discussing and reasoning about them, you can also use this book to navigate a deeper learning path through its many footnotes.

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#68

Post by gamerDude »

logicchains wrote: post #17
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't disagree more with your post. The author is basically just putting out a detailed study plan for passing an exam. If a doctor posted a plan for passing the medical boards would your first thought be "Wow, look at that massive medical monoculture problem!" That seems like a ridiculous stretch in my opinion. To your second point, I hear this all the time in threads about tech interviewing: "Tech interviews a…

>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 friends from residency thought similarly. That's just a few data points and maybe some doctors are helped, but it definitely isn't every doctor.

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#69

Post by freebee16 »

got to last round for E6 and found it frustrating. Answering the technical questions required intimate knowledge of production systems that scale to billions of users with proprietary hardware (i.e. no cloud). It seemed to require previous experience at facebook, google, or amazon.

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#70

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

gedy wrote: post #10
mberning wrote: post #5

Facebook have been contacting me for years on linkedin and email asking me to interview. This is exactly why I have never responded.

Unless these skills that are interviewed for are directly translateable to the job, it seems like this "prep work" filters out busy candidates who are already working and have families, kids, lives. Actually maybe that is the intention, QED

Working as intended.

We need people who are willing to be worked to the bone and only bleed FB-brand blood :D

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