Production Engineering at Facebook - Interview
How was the interview structure ? Things to keep in mind ? How would this be different from a normal SWE interview ? Is the priority on Coding/System Design going to be much lesser than in case of SWE ?
Debugging
Debugging system issues ?
Ya
I’ve interviewed for this position last year. I’ll just describe my experience by steps: 1. 15 min on the phone with hr 2. Phone coding interview 3. Phone linux interview On-site 1. White board code interview 2. White board code interview 3. Lunch with an engineer 4. Behavioral interview 5. Linux interview You should really know operating systems. Coding interviews will be very similar to what you have in SWE. But they will go really deep in memory management, file systems, basically the whole unixstd library. You should also know interprocess communication, thread synchronization, cpu scheduling and so on. Also, there were some questions on system debugging. Know your terminal, and what commands you can run to check if something went wrong.
Thanks , did you get the offer? For the Linux interview , what is the format ? A bunch of debugging questions ? Or a much bigger question similar to a system design interview ? On Mem Mgmt/FS/IPC etc the emphasis is always on debugging live systems ?
I didn’t. They generally ask open questions. Something like, “tell me how memory management works” or “what happens when you type something in the terminal and hit enter”. In this specific question, you should know that a terminal runs in a main process, and it creates a sub process in every command that is not native. So it’s really theoretical. I felt that the system debugging questions were a completely different part of the interview. In this part you should be able to show off that you know theory, but you also know a wide variety of commands as well (and when to use them). This last part is about combining theory and practice.
Seems like devops heavy role
In a typical scenario , 5 SWE 1 PE, how do they work together ? Would be great if you could give an idea
In a typical scenario , let’s say in a team of 5 SWE 1 PE, how do they interact/ work together ? Would be great if someone could give an idea
What is production engineering? What is the difference between production engineering and SWE?
SRE
I have heard that Production Engg is considered more “upmarket” at FB compared to conventional SRE, but I could be wrong