Facebook senior software engineer interview

Post by dntrkv » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 4:06 PM UTC

cableshaft wrote: post #45

tuvistavie wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The difference is that what the doctors put so much time into learning can actually be quite useful for their job. I'd be curious to hear what a doctor would think about that. My intuition would be that, as for almost any exam, a lot of time is spent on things that will not be useful for any other purpose than the exam itself.

Even if it isn't, do doctors have to retake these exams multiple times (as developers have to do this for multiple interviews) every two years when wanting to switch jobs (doctors often don't have to switch jobs, they often have their own practice).

Post by wan23 » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 4:06 PM UTC

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.

Post by mrits » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 4:07 PM UTC

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #65

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…

Post by programmertote » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 4:08 PM UTC

NeverFade wrote: post #7

Besides the usual advice, this observation is very interesting: > Applying for senior engineering positions (>E4) in FANG companies is one of the best ways to get into them. This comment by a veteran senior engineer confirms to me that Facebook, just like most other FANGs, does a poor job of promoting from within. There are multiple comments to the same effect from many other FANG employees: It's much easier to get r…

Post by danenania » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 4:10 PM 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…