I've heard Facebook interviews people from various backround - including embedded development, etc. Question is: If you've been doing firmware development / compilers / etc .. for all your careers, for the "system design" round will you get questions like: Design a web crawler / Design a distributed database / Design TinyURL ? Or you will get questions like "Design an operating system / Design a debugger / Design a driver model ... etc " The above example is somewhat extreme, but even so - does it make sense to ask a Android game developer to design a distributed database ? I know "they want to see how you think" but services people have an extreme advantage in such design questions. I imagine if asking a services developer to design an Android Game / Debugger / Operating system they will probably not do so well. And yes, web system design is most likely the thing that you will be doing at Facebook ... but the question now is ... why interview people from other backrounds than web system design to begin with ?
It depends on the role and level of the position you apply for. If you're applying for an E5 software engineer position, how do you expect not to be asked design questions that will gauge your ability on an aspect that will be crucial for you to meet expectations at your new role?
We have a different type of design question for people that are coming from different backgrounds (ask your recruiter about it). Also, many of the design questions are open ended enough that you can shift the discussion to a part of the problem you are comfortable with (eg the API, UI architecture, etc)
... though really, unless you're applying for a specific position, you'll kind of be expected to know how to reason about distributed systems to some basic degree.
Not sure about FB but Google did ask me for a new grad interview. It was a question specific to the team's product.
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I think it's completely fair. Even a first year computer science student will be able to give a basic answer for any of those questions. Asking you to implement a feature in browser JavaScript wouldn't be fair, on the other hand.
I would not have known how to design a distributed database in my first year