Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Get that job at Facebook (2012)

facebook.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 174 posts

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#81

Post by rhizome »

aristus wrote: post #70
CoolGuySteve wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that really bothers me about these postings is the advice that you should 'prep'. Conceivably, many applicants will already have a job that requires them to code 8 hours a day. But somehow, the skills required to pass their interview are so out of line with what a programmer does day to day, that extracurricular studying is required. It would suggest that the interview itself selects for mostly irrelevant s…

(Author of the post) Consider this: In any job you're going to do "normal" stuff the majority of the time. The other times, you have to pull out A-level work. It's not 24x7, but when the time comes you have to be able to do it, eg writing a parser for an obscure query language that will get executed $X billion times per day, so it better be small, correct, and fast. We ask people to prep because we want to know if yo…

It reads like a category error to me. My experience is that the coming times that require A-level work from memory are emergencies and the "$X billion times a day query parser" ones are not, allowing more iteration and collaboration.

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#82

Post by dyno12345 »

rkuykendall-com wrote: post #41
mcrittenden wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, if the .php extensions on most of the URLs is any indication.

Hm, I clicked all around the site and wasn't able to get a .php in any of my URLs. They were all "clean" or "pretty" URLs, as I would expect from a profesional, large web app. I wonder why we have different URLs.

https://www.facebook.com/home.php

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#83

Post by btilly »

chacham15 wrote: post #79
jiggy2011 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that case, it's probably most space efficient to place each new window next to an already visible window or at an edge of the screen. So keep a list of possible candidate positions. Each of these positions represents either an edge of the screen or a position directly above/below/to the left/to the right of an existing window. You will need to calculate different offsets for each of these circumstances to generate…

You know, for people who have taken graphics classes, this seems like a much easier question because they know about AABB trees. That is the problem at the heart of the question. Also, your idea about candidate positions is wasteful. Just invert the tree so that it contains empty space instead of full space. Then, on insert, remove from the tree.

All kinds of problems are easier for people who know how to solve them. :-)

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#85

Post by aristus »

rhizome wrote: post #81
aristus wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Author of the post) Consider this: In any job you're going to do "normal" stuff the majority of the time. The other times, you have to pull out A-level work. It's not 24x7, but when the time comes you have to be able to do it, eg writing a parser for an obscure query language that will get executed $X billion times per day, so it better be small, correct, and fast. We ask people to prep because we want to know if yo…

It reads like a category error to me. My experience is that the coming times that require A-level work from memory are emergencies and the "$X billion times a day query parser" ones are not, allowing more iteration and collaboration.

You may be right, but all I know is my own experience. The query parser example is real; I had to do something like that recently in order to more deeply analyze some performance bugs.

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#86

Post by muriithi »

simonsarris wrote: post #46

I really like this kind of post and I wish more companies would write about their expectations before you actually get to the interview. Still, it seems like rather run-of-the-mill process. It will certainly filter out the bad, but you may miss some very good workers who work in different ways. Facebook still seems to be totally focused on code problems, and doesn't even mention if what you've already built is import…

This sounds similar to something I read about the process at Shopify.

http://swizec.com/blog/the-most-pleasant-job-interview-i-hav...

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#87

Post by randartie »

7Figures2Commas wrote: post #62

Here's a question: at companies with these kind of approaches, how many of the founders and early employers would have done well in these interviews themselves? Obviously, services grow and the Facebook of 2013 is very different from the Facebook of 2004, but it's kind of funny to see companies that succeeded because the original team was able to ship (period) evolve to focus on hiring CS majors who can reinvent the…

If you inspect the actual early employees, a majority of them were ivy league grads who most certainly could solve these easy interview problems (It also helped that they could ship code).

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#88

Post by kubrickslair »

kamaal wrote: post #72
kubrickslair wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another reason I am not fond of this- it is easily hackable. I know some pretty average people who prepared for months, went through all questions they could find online, ignored their day jobs and cleared the interviews, while some really talented people could not. Funny that this got brought on the Facebook thread. Though I never applied at FB, I have 'mentored' two people who made it through the process. Mentoring…

Its very easy to game the interview at big web companies. I mean even if they ask all these text book academia related questions- Algo/DS ones etc. I remember once there was a question on Quora about an IIT BTech guy who had offers from all major web companies. Some one asked him how he did it. And his advice was that you had to simply 'practice'. Simply go out on the internet check for good interview forums work on…

Agree on all points.

Interesting that you brought IIT up. Though I barely cleared IIT JEE and did not attend it for I could not get CS at any of the good schools, I had the feeling that it was becoming more and more hackable with the proliferation of coaching institutes. When I was in a top 5 PhD program which attracts the best of IIT K/B/M guys the quality drop became more evident over the years. There were and are still very bright IITians at my school, but I saw more noise coming in at later years.

And for those who are not aware- there are cram shops in India which 'train' you to clear Google/ Microsoft interviews. And this has been going for at least 6 years, if not more. Now from talking to my friends in India I get the impression that the superficial interview difficulty is higher in India than the Bay Area for similar companies. And that is despite the work quality being much higher in Silicon Valley.

It's all very funny and ironic.

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#89

Post by randartie »

dyno12345 wrote: post #82
rkuykendall-com wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, I clicked all around the site and wasn't able to get a .php in any of my URLs. They were all "clean" or "pretty" URLs, as I would expect from a profesional, large web app. I wonder why we have different URLs.

https://www.facebook.com/home.php

That's most likely just an endpoint named 'home.php' which now leads to some controller instead of actually loading a file called home.php

Re: Get that job at Facebook (2012)

#90

Post by jiggy2011 »

svachalek wrote: post #68
ritchiea wrote: post #31

I hope this doesn't sound facetious, but what I hear over and over again is that places like Facebook have difficult technical interviews that are algorithm focused to create more false negatives than false positives because they work on hard problems. What are some concrete examples of hard problems tech companies face that require novel solutions and why are algorithms problems the best way to find the people quali…

In my experience, I've seen 3 kinds of jobs that demand engineers who can solve "hard" problems: 1. Obviously hard, and needs no explanation e.g. self-driving cars. 2. Basic problems done at ridiculous scale. Quickly matching keywords to web pages is not a hard problem; quickly matching keywords to every web page on the internet is a hard problem. 3. The problem is that (forgivably or not, depending on circumstances)…

You can also add, doing all of the above things in a situation where it is extremely profitable for others to game your system.
Post reply on HN