Had lunch with a friend who works at an agency and has access to Facebook core and is regularly contributing in some way or another in a way where Facebook Engineers are reviewing their code. He’d like to get out of the agency game so I said why don’t you apply at Facebook since you’re working on their code. He basically said he’s worried about the programming acrobatics he’d have to do during the interview. Basically it sounds like he feels the interview process is not real world at all and is worried about that. Is this true?
A lot of people can code but most of the top tech companies look for aptitude amongst other things which is hard to demonstrate during day to day coding. Hence the full loops I would think
Interview process is not real world at all at most companies. By and large it’s impossible to make interview process similar to real work at scale especially for senior engineers. Yet interview process at FB works pretty well - people who pass filter are motivated, smart and self-driven. False positive rate is in single digits. False negative is probably very high but who cares as long as we hit our hiring goals. On your case - FB (and most top tier companies) do not use contractors to work on core. Your friend may have access to full codebase but he is most likely working on internal tools (think HR portal, etc) or one off marketing concepts.) While it’s similar to what FB employees do at junior level it’s not what we want from more senior eng (generalizing - your specific friend may do Nobel worthy level work in ML for what I know) On converting to fb employee - Good recommendations from FTE FB engineers he works with will go long way helping him get the job but he still need to pass the interview loop. Interview process for contractors is very lightweight (one non technical conversation) so we need more prove than ability to work on simple CRUD app to hire full time.
Thanks for this answer. Yeah re core access I assumed the same but wanted to post in his words. At Shopify someone like him might at most have access to a private GraphQL API or a part of the schema. He’s literally under the assumption that he has to work towards building a compiler during the interview