Compensation is the biggest pro. Also, unlike other hire to fire companies (most tech companies at this point in 2024), you at least have a chance to prove yourself and are given a couple months to onboard. There are worse tech companies out there such as Amazon and Intuit, but Meta’s culture is still quite terrible. They try and justify the long hours and stress with how much you can make - Meta still pays more than any other major tech company, even in 2024, which is definitely a pro, but the culture is cutthroat and you can’t trust anyone. It would probably be easier to work two remote jobs at “less prestigious” tech or tech adjacent companies to make the same amount at Meta with more stability, better WLB, and less drama.
Pretty much the same as what one would experience at most tech companies in 2024. But some aspects are better or worse than others. Long hours. WLB is highly team dependent. Apparently Meta used to be a lot better in this regard, but now not so much. It is intense, but if you have startup experience, it is at least less intense than that. And again, it is more fair than a place like Amazon. Office politics are a thing at all tech companies, but a little more extreme at Meta. Blame and shame culture is big. People are snakes and are prepared to throw even the newest and most vulnerable employees under the bus to save their own skins. This makes things quite unfair, but as long as you’re proactive and document everything thoroughly, you’re at least given a chance to refute these attacks. A lot of gossip and backstabbing. This is separate from and still related to PSC culture, which everyone complains about. Management is terrible overall. Sometimes there is micromanagement. One of the few companies where it’s possible you’ll have a manager younger than you, even if you’re only 27-31ish. Often ICs seem to be held accountable for things that are way beyond their day-to-day scope - basically things that are ultimately the fault of leadership and management. Management frequently tries to pin things on their employees. Your manager is often trying to screw you, and if they can’t find a way, they are often trying to invent things you did wrong. This isn’t a dealbreaker because as long as you’re doing your job, it is easy to refute, but it creates a ton of work because you have to be extremely well-organized and have documented every interaction with your manager colleagues. I recommend studying employment law / consulting with an employment lawyer early on in your tenure at Meta, so you know what to look for. Because it is a massive tech company, you are there to please your manager and make them look good, so you need to do pretty much whatever they say. there’s a lot of internal conflict because it’s very authoritarian, also fairly draconian, and it’s bottoms up at the same time, every man for themselves. Do everything your manager says and it is somehow still all up to you as an individual employee to make the company successful. To top it all off, your colleagues suck too. People brag about work that YOU did as being THEIR work that THEY did if it is successful. If a project involving multiple people is so much as an hour late, then YOU are blamed, even if you had nothing to do with the lateness. The lateness itself isn’t really the problem because guess what? It’s not anything is broken. Except for when things do break and the whole app crashes for a day because everyone is forced to focus on office politics instead of their actual work. it’s not really about the value you create, so much as it is the PERCEIVED value you create and whether or not your manager likes you. Ergo, a lot of bootlicking charlatans make it to the top.
We know that Instagram runs on Django as its main server. How easy or hard is it to run and maintain this architecture ? context : I hear a lot of Java or C++ for most architectures. And I get it - languages like C++ can be used to yield the best performance possible for a given hardware. But In th...Read more
Hello! I have a mobile system design interview coming up and am trying to get a list of questions asked at other companies. Please contribute to this list with your experience :) 1. ride sharing services between three buildings of a campus 2. photo streaming app 3. Instagram stories 4. Design Slack...Read more
My ATG SF onsite is scheduled and I will have a algorithm round, code design round, system architecture round, bar raiser, and hiring manager. Does anyone have examples of architecture round? Is it generic like Design Instagram or something more related to the domain? If anyone has any input I wou...Read more
Have an onsite coming up for a SWE role. Is the system design round focused on high level architecture (databases, caches, something like “design Instagram”) or more OOP focused (designing classes and inheritance structure, something like “design Chess”)? I have 1 yoe if thats relevant
Almost anyone that studied grokking would know that twitter and instagram seems to do a combination of fanout and polling(famous people). Does a TikTok architecture do the same thing when a video is uploaded by someone? #bytedance #tiktok #systemdesin
I've Dropbox onsite coming up. Can someone please share some insights into the architecture interview as to what type of questions are asked and what is expected from the candidate? Is it usual application system design? e.g. design dropbox or design instagram etc. or more on the infra side? I ask...Read more
Looking to interview with Meta for M1 role. Recruiter gave a choice between Distributed Systems vs Product Architecture(API focused) for the System Design section. Looking at typical interview questions in Grokking SD and other places : Design Instagram, TinyURL etc, they all seem a mix of both Back...Read more
How technically deep do the SDM interviews go? For e.g. for behaviral questions, will the interviewers go deep into understanding the reasons a particular tech decision was made or low-level undersanding of the Architecture? For System design, are the questions more like design Instagram news feed o...Read more
Hi Everyone, in my previous Blind post, I discussed five of the most frequent Facebook system design interview questions that I have collected by browsing through multiple websites like LeetCode, Blind, 1point3acre, etc. These questions are: 1. Design Facebook NewsFeed 2. Design Facebook Status Sear...Read more
Hi Folks, need interview guidance for RRK Interview. I come from a non-cloud background but have taken up a course on Coursera to learn the basic cloud constructs and GCP services. I have heard there are are architecture design question where the interviewers like to spend the most amount of time. C...Read more
For anyone who interviewed for Staff Mobile Engineer roles in last couple of years, could you please share the interview process at different companies? What all technical rounds were conducted? My assumption is that it will be more focused on Mobile System Design, but curious if Backend System Des...Read more
Thank you blind for all the help! I am here to give back to fellow blinders with prep materials. 12 offers secured so far: Verkada - 285 Google - 260 (low balling and crying they won’t budge if u don’t have FB - L4) LinkedIn - 290 Bloomberg - 270 Goldman Sachs - 240 Twilio - 260 6 other series C a...Read more
I'm preparing for an interview at Google for Embedded SWE position, and I'd like some input on what to (really) expect. The prep material I got includes everything you would expect from a SWE interview these days (algorithms, data structures, system design) plus a few pages on embedded systems spec...Read more
Hello I am trying to prepare my upcoming interview for "Modeling and Virtual Platform Software Engineer" position at Meta Reality Labs. I would appreciate if you could share a piece of advice/tips/experience in preparing interview for Modeling SWE roles in C++. In other words, what type of domain...Read more
Coding round format (45 min): - 5/35/5 - 5 minutes intros, 35 minutes coding to solve 2 LC problems, 5 minutes questions Coding portion (35 min): - Problem by interviewer - Solution suggestion: data structure, algorithm, time/space complexity - "Ready to write code" - Write code - Think out loud as...Read more
Hello Blinders, I want to give life to my idea and working on getting things started. Since Ideas are worthless, I cannot ask others to dedicate their time to develop my app and wanted to build a decent MVP that can scale for at least 100K - 1M users. My idea is a kind of social app for a specific n...Read more
It is not an exhaustive list and might not work for everyone. Also it is not a one size fits all thing but I hope it helps you to draft a plan and figure out how to tackle the sys design. Resources: 1. https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer 2. https://github.com/binhnguyennus/awesome-s...Read more
Coding round format (45 min): - 5/35/5 - 5 minutes intros, 35 minutes coding to solve 2 LC problems, 5 minutes questions Coding portion (35 min): - Problem by interviewer - Solution suggestion: data structure, algorithm, time/space complexity - "Ready to write code" - Write code - Think out loud as...Read more
Hi, I am graduate student looking for 2024 summer SDE/SE internships & related referrals. - Expecting to graduate by Dec 24. - Working as lead software engineer in a social media research lab at grad school. - Experience: 2 years as Software engineer in startup - Tech: Java, Go, Python, C/C++, API ...Read more
Now I've cooled down of call from the recruiter and able to create a post about my experience with FB. To be open I don't expect I would fail the on-site, but looks like I did something not extremely perfect. On-Site. Every session about 45 minutes with 15min break. 1. HR. Greeting with HR. Nothi...Read more