Facebook Interview Feedback - How to deal with location?
I interviewed for E6. I got strong hire on both coding and hire on everything else. One system design is not sure about the level. I will get committee decision in the following weeks. It's very unlikely I don't get an offer recruiter said. More likely I get E5, but if I get E6 there is no team matching on bootcamp but team is assigned with the offer. Now my problem and I need your advice. This is for London. Things have changed in my family since I started interviewing this summer. London is not an option anymore but I still want to join Facebook. I would love to go to Zurich, where I can get my wife to agree with. Marriage is a compromise. Based on my background (C++, embedded system, RTOS etc) and what I read about FRL, it could be a good match for me despite my lack of domain knowledge (CV, VR etc). How can I handle this? I know after one year I can change team and location but I want to avoid to go to London (alone). What would be the best course of actions? What are my options? (Apart from divorce ehehehehe) I will share numbers as soon as I have them. FYI: I am still interviewing with Apple (so far so good) and Google (have to start) for which location is not a problem, but my hopes for Google are low (really don't know how to properly prepare). I failed Amazon on-site. For those wondering about my preparation System Design: I have ZERO hands-one experience with distributed system. I didn't know anything when I started my preparation. I read DDIA and System Design Interview (https://systeminterview.com/) book (better than grokking) and I did tons of mocks in the 2 months before the interview (like everyday). I also did a couple of paid on interviewing.io which were very useful. InfoQ videos are extremely useful. I lost count of how many I watched. And of course, countless of articles online to dig deeper in some area. Everything was new to me. It was a lot of work. Here you can see an old (bad performance) of mine, but at least you can get an idea about the format I used: https://bit.ly/36fxRhk Unfortunately the idea of recording my sessions came very late to my mind. And yes, this is also self-promoting. Coding: FB is very predictable, so stick to LC tagged questions and do lots of mocks. Train on speed and debugging manually, like I did here: https://bit.ly/2NB6vvz Some questions were not on LC but very similar. One interviewer asked me 5 (five) questions, because I was stupid honest about having seen 3 of them (all hard) and knew optimal solution which I outlined clearly. Behavioral: Do NOT underestimate this one! I started practicing and collecting stories only close to the end, but for senior positions is probably the most important. Luckily it went decent. I want to thank blind! It allowed me to connect with some people who have been practicing mock interviews with me and shared this journey in the last 3 months. Thanks a million!
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thanks for sharing your experience and good luck. I know that the Zurich office is smaller and mostly home to VR teams. If you get an offer with the expected level, you are looking at fewer options compared to London. Probably your recruiter is the best source for this. A couple of questions as someone failed the E6 loop 2 years back. - Did they initially reached out for the E6 loop or you bumped your interview loop to E6 after the initial reach? - Watching videos is great but I guess watching them without purpose or without taking notes would not be very useful. What was your strategy on absorbing ideas from scalability videos? - You said you did a ton of mocks, I am guessing they are free since you mentioned paying to intervewing.io. which platform did you use for that?
Thanks for your message. When they reached out we didn't talk about level. They decided to go with E6 after my phone screen performance. I took a lot of notes from the video, but helped me absorbed the concept was then practicing through mocks. For example, there is a great video from netflix about notification which talk about push registry and stuff and I started using it in mocks everytime I had to solve a similar problem. Yes I only paid for 6 mocks on interviewing.io all the rest for free with people I met on blind. If you want some help with that let me know. I could give you 1-2 free mock sessions.
@op, how did you find people on the blind for the mock interviews? I would be interested in the mock session if you could provide them. Thanks!
What is this bootcamp thing people keep saying ? Is it like a crash course to bring new hires up to speed and then match them with a team ?
I believe it is this process where you learn about what each group does and you can choose your team.
Hi OP, Do you mind to share why you moved from embedded domain to Distributed systems? Was this mainly to get into FAANG and increase TC or out of interest in distributed systems? I understand most FAANG like companies work in distributed systems and have less opportunities in embedded space. I am in a similar dilemma with most of experience only in C++ desktop application development. Any response from you will be of great help.
My goal is to join FRL. I don't want to shift to distributed systems.
Can you give few tips, question, framework on behaviour questions?
You were able to LC hards with just three months of practice, do u have prior experience with competitive coding or are u just smart
What is infoQ? Also, which platform did you use for your daily mock interviews?
Look it on YouTube. Or Google. Google draw.
Which System Design interview book you read? System design interview Bible?
I updated the post with link. You can buy the book on Amazon like I did.
Did you go over these books cover to cover? or was there any particular part which you tried learning more, especially for ddia book. Thanks.