I honestly hear everywhere that FB interviews suck but it wasn't my experience. I've had 4 rounds of interview today. Systems design went well that we were discussing details of the designing product (for some reason it felt more like data structures design rather than back end) but Interviewer said that's fine. Then i had a really amazing manager conducting behavioral interview. The first Interviewer was late so he actually said he won't be asking me coding so that i can have enough time for my lunch break. Such a thoughtful manager*. Then typical lunch, i found the FB office cold(didn't take my jacket) but that was okay. Had a nice chat with the guy. Then an coding exercise with an engineer. He asked me a question. I've solved it. Then he mentioned it's not efficient enough. I went ahead and made it more efficient. He asked a follow up question. Nothing tricky or trying to fool me. He changed some requirements and i also solved those follow ups. Then we wrapped it up with q/a. The final coding was amazing. The dude was so cool. He asked me a question, i told him i know the question and verbally told him the answer. Then he asked me another question. This one I didn't know the answer but i told him a simple brute force approach (which can be implemented in 3 lines) and we discussed pros/cons. He asked how to improve the time efficiency and i explained it. Then he asked me another harder question. I thought I initially understood it and came up with a linear algorithm. While coding it on the board he was actually chatting with me about my coding style( like he liked that i was using quick one liners) and referring to Guava library that can even do some parts of my code. Once i finished i noticed I overengineered my solution because it was handling an edge case differently. He asked me the 4th coding question (we were running out of time) and he said i can just write pseudocode for that. I explained how it works and wrote the pseudocode for the critical algorithmic part. Explained runtime and memory complexity. Then we wrapped it with q/a while he was walking me out. I personally found the overall experience really pleasant. I definitely think FB engineers are down to earth and not snobby. *I have had onsites where they literally asked me to do systems design during my lunch break. So that's like 5 steps ahead.
You heard that FB interviews suck? That’s not what I heard. What I heard is that working in FB sucks - stressful and depressing.
Well honestly the lunch person told me the workload is really heavy.
Well, that sounds about right. Someone in blind was saying coasting in FB means working 50 hrs a week. So you can imagine.
How did you prepare for system design?
I honestly didn't find my studies that useful because FB has 2 streams for back end systems design. I opted in for distributed systems but i had more product/api design related one came in. I purely did that by using my compsci + engineering knowledge
This post has been paid for by Facebook, Inc. JK, happy for you.
What was the system design question Coding question were from top Facebook leetcode questions ?
You are feeling so since you think you did very well. Be wary, they may even reject you as you did only coding question in one round. It’s just a cognitive bias.
Well i asked that one coding one, whether he is going to ask me one question and he said he'll do follow ups.
I only wish you well and I hope you get the offer. I’m just saying you have a biased opinion on fb interview since you think you did well
Haha there was another interesting post about facebook interview being the worst interview ever 3 hours ago
Same here! I was interviewing for a design role and everything stating from recruiter to all the rounds of interviews (had 6 rounds) were amazing! Didn’t feel like the interview at all even though my brain was fried after.
Shh blind =! Reality
It really depends on your luck with which interviewers you get.
What/How much have you prepped?
About 120 LC, 75 of them were FB tagged over 6 months
That’s it?