One of my ex colleague, whom I consider one of the smartest people I worked with failed Facebook interview. I know he is very good. I was surprised by the outcome. His hypothesis was he knew all the questions asked in the interview and was able to code it very quickly and perhaps the interviewers did not like that as they did not get the signals about his thinking. Or may be he was considered not honest about telling the interviewer that he knows the question. Does his hypothesis makes sense? Apart from being able to code the solution correctly, what does Facebook look in the candidates? What do u do when interviewer asks a question whose answer you already know? ps: he was not boastful. We were just discussing interview outcomes.
In my experiences, the interviews where I was least confident I got best results, and when I was most confident / felt I nailed it, I got worst results. Completely backwards from expectations. I have some suspicions as to why this occurs, but it’s otherwise completely baffling.
Do you interview candidates and write feedback for them at work? I used to have trouble predicting my own interview results. After playing the role of the interviewer, I have a much better idea of what a successful interview looks like.
Aha. Now when u say it I can totally relate to it. I have ended up not getting offer when I was very confident about the interview. I wonder if the confidence comes across as arrogance.
If the interviewer felt like it was obvious that your friend knew the question, they wouldn’t penalise them for it. The interviewer would’ve asked your friend to talk through how they were solving the problem so they would have got some signal on thought process and problem solving skills. There are typically (for individual contributors interviews) two coding and two system design as well as a behavioural. You didn’t mention which stage your friend got rejected at but in any instance, interviewers are trained to always get signal on ‘fit/cultural alignment’ and ‘behavioural’ as opposed to just technical signal. This may be where your friend didn’t do so well sadly. Your friend would/should have been provided the decision along with feedback.
What does fb look in the culture fit?
At the end it’s all interviewer’s perception about a candidate. There was a lot of reports here saying that obvious prep study would gain extra points in their review.
They expect that you prepare and ask you to do so, even provide a lot of helpful pointers to resources, so it’s very unlikely that excessive preparation is the reason. He probably didn’t do so well in the behavioral round. You need to prepare for those questions too.
Some people are just not that good at interviewing and will inadvertently blabber something incorrect under pressure. If he is smart as you say, he will work on that aspect.
Sounds more like ego and pride makes him think it went better than it did. It also could just not have been a good fit for him
He was not being boastful. We were just casually discussing interviewing strategies. Let me add that detail in the post.
Not even that he was boasting. His ego could make him still think it went great when it didnt.