Live data from Hacker News

Facebook senior software engineer interview

daqo.medium.com

91–100 of 524 posts

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#91
post #46
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…

The author mentions CLRS. It’s an introductory level algorithms book and is used in Junior/Senior years of undergrad. Expecting a senior engineer to be well versed in undergrad level algorithms is not a monoculture problem.

The problem is not the expectation but that something like that can even come up during an interview for a senior position!

It is like testing a surgeon's suturing skill during a job interview. Of course, it is an essential skill for them to have, but that's something for a school exam and not job interview for someone with verifiable credentials. Or do you think that surgeon didn't suture in their previous job and just "winged it through" for years? What exactly do you hope to achieve with such an interview question?

That's exactly what is wrong with software engineering hiring and interviewing. It is focusing on examining nonsensical minutiae instead of whether the person has any sort of design skills, is capable of teamwork or has any sort of project management skills.

These are way more important for a senior engineer than whether or not they have crammed algorithms for a month and can reproduce them on the spot in front of a whiteboard (and will promptly forget them in a week or two again). That algorithm can be looked up in 5 minutes if needed, lack of project management skill could pretty much doom the company in the worst case.

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#92

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…

working at different organizations builds engineering and emotional maturity, no?

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#93
post #85

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…

"But why?" Because most people can't. And they want to make sure you can.

And it proves what exactly? Except that they have lost out on a good hire only because that hire is not familiar with that particular programming language that the interview is.

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#94
I passed a Facebook Infra interview three times: 2007, but I declined the offer (whoops); 2009, accepted, worked there for 4 years as an IC5; 2016, returned for 6 months (whoops).

The 2016 interview was much harder due to the influx of leetcode-style questions. I don’t think I’d pass one in 2020.

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#95
A warning from a Python developer & hiring manager: The Python used in Elements of Programming Interviews in Python is NOT clean or idiomatic. Perhaps they designed it for whiteboard-style interviews, but if you walk into a Python shop that does stuff with coderpad/screen-shared you code like in the book you're not going to make the best impression.

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#96
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 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…

The US Medical Licensing Examination is mainly for medical students not "senior" physicians, and the pass rate is extremely high for U.S. M.D. medical school graduates, over 90%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Medical_Licensin...

In other words, it's not a standard job interview technique for doctors, it's a one-time requirement for licensing.

The other difference of course is that doctors are legally permitted to open up your guts with a knife, unlike Facebook engineers.

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#97

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…

A better comparison is getting into Harvard. Do you really want to go to a school where getting in is a matter of acing a prescriptive test? There's a reason college applications value experience and diversity.

Yea, to keep the Jews out.

https://www.businessinsider.com/the-ivy-leagues-history-of-d...

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#98
post #92

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…

working at different organizations builds engineering and emotional maturity, no?

Perhaps, but rampant job-hopping as a norm is definitely not the outcome these tech companies aspire for.

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#99
It seems to me to be almost superhuman to read multiple chapters and solve all the exercises in a single day. Maybe that's just the normal level of ability for FAANG staff?

EDIT: maybe it's more reasonable if you're doing this full time. 1hr/question and checking the next day if you get stuck, as he writes in his blog, seems a lot more reasonable.

Re: Facebook senior software engineer interview

#100
post #55
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…

That approach would work for a startup, but not when you’re hiring 100s of engineers on a weekly basis. Not to mention the amount of bias that approach will introduce. At least with the current approach, you know exactly what the criteria is to land the gig.
Post reply on HN