Interview Prep
Hi. I have an upcoming interview at Facebook for a data scientist role (they call it data science, it's really product analytics). This is the role: https://www.facebook.com/careers/v2/jobs/209905326241987/?q=data%20science%20analytics&location=menlo-park I want to make sure I'm really well prepared for the product interview. I've read some threads on quora and on here, plus the prep package facebook sent out. Is anyone, particularly people in product or data, interested in doing a couple mock interviews? I'm happy to pay for the time (after all, what's a couple hundred bucks for a role that pays much more).
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I've been preparing for this interview for the past month or so actually, and am advancing to the onsite soon. Maybe afterwards I'll look to see if I have time to help you with some prep. Your recruiter should be pretty thorough and everything here is basically from the recruiter or from one of the resources he gave me. I don't think there's supposed to be any tricks - just sheer preparation. The more I scoured the web for more material, the more I found out it just comes down generating your own questions about Facebook's ecosystem of products and practicing how to structure your answers out loud. For the first screen, practice your SQL on a whiteboard or coderpad that doesn't execute, and try to explain your answers as you're doing them. It would also help to tackle questions in the context of Facebook's product, than any other random scenario (tables with user ids, dates, statuses/actions of some sort, etc.), then figuring out iterations of questions like how many users did action X on day Y, grouped by category Z? Should expect at least a couple tables to select the proper joins, or if it's a single table, might involve a self join. Don't assume anything about the tables - ask about what they actually represent and what they don't. For the product/business question - try to research studies or questions more along the lines of what a Product Manager would get asked in an interview. Create a list of Facebook's entire product line, then speak out loud what the goal of each product is and how it relates to Facebook's goals. When asked about a certain feature, you'll want to ensure the metric that you select to test the success of the feature is a signal towards the product's growth, and also Facebook's growth as a whole. Then, you'll also want to be prepared with explaining the actual execution of how you would design an appropriate experiment, which likely would come in the form of an AB Test. Hope this was helpful for you and anyone else who might stumble on this post in the future, and good luck! (And good luck to me, too, as I go onsite soon :) haha).
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Ask your recruiter material for prep. They have some list of topics to touch.