I have a virtual onsite for Facebook Infrastructure team london coming up for software engineer position. Any tips/suggestions for the interview or feedback on the role/organization? system design? Do they mostly ask LC qns related to regular FB or more of domain related questions? Also FB gives the coding excercises for practise, how worth doing that is? please help??
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Are you done with initial phone screen? What was the question?
Good to know.. Didn't know posts expire. Here it is raw: I am posting my entire interview experience for those who may be interested. If you wanna just see numbers, skip to the bottom. My Summary: 7 YOE Currently at AWS for around 2 years. This adventure all started when a coworker left for another large tech company. After hearing his offer, it was confirmation that some of the large numbers you see on blind are indeed possible. It was significantly more than I was making and we were both very similar engineers. I hit leetcode hard over the next two months. I did a mix of easy, medium, and hards with most of my questions being mediums. While Iām sure others have done more, I completed approximately 200 problems. During this entire time, I would always talk out loud as I would in an actual interview. I think this helped me more than I realized. I got nothing but perfect feedback on all my interviews around communication. Talking out loud while leetcoding is a perfect way to prep for the actual interview. While prepping, I reached out to as many companies as I could. I also go access to some of the recruiters my coworker knew (this was a significant help). Overall, I was talking to the following companies: * Dropbox * Lyft * Stripe * Microsoft * Snap * Facebook * Google * Auth-0 * Splunk I did phone screens with all of them. Splunk, Auth-0, and stripe fell off the radar for one reason or another. I passed phone screens for every other company and made it to onsites. A few things I noticed: * Phone screens were a lot harder than I expected. Most of the problems I got were pretty challenging (maybe an easier LC medium?). I kinda though the screeners would be super easy as they were just trying to weed out really weak candidates. However, Lyft and Snap had me do follow-up screens even though I felt like I did pretty good on both their screens. It seemed like they were really looking for perfect answers.. * During phone screens and at the interviews themselves, I saw a lot of LC questions. Always start with the most popular questions on LC and also look at the company specific questions. This helped me at multiple times throughout this entire process. * Talk out loud as much as possible. If nothing else, it makes it feel more collaborative instead of just some people staring at you while you code. The phone screens were pretty awkward because itās just over the phone. * Ask the interviewer what they want to see next. For example, after completing the code, Iād ask something like: āOk I think itās done. Would you like me to walk through it to find any bugs? Or talk about unit tests? Or is there something else youād like to move on to?ā This lets the interviewer inject any hints they may want to provide and saves you time if they are already completely happy with what youāve already written. For the 6 on-sites, I split them over two weeks starting with my least preferred first as cannon fodder. My order was: Microsoft, Dropbox, Google, Lyft, Facebook, Snap. I wasnāt super interested in snap but I saw they had some really killer offers so I wanted a big offer to pump up other offers. My thoughts on the interviews (going to be limited as I donāt wanna break any NDAs) *Microsoft* Complete garbage. Holy shit, I did terrible and the interviewers were terrible. If they would have given me an offer it would have been a huge red flag. The recruiters were all really nice and the interview structure was also nice (4 rounds with 15 minute breaks between each round). It was also a bulk interview so many candidates were there. My system design interviewer was nice. However, the two people asking whiteboard questions were not good. The first guy asked a very simple yet very binary linked list question. It was the kind of question you either aced (and wrote up a solution to with just a few lines of code) or got stuck on. Either outcome would not give you very much data on the candidate. I just couldnāt see the pattern and completely bombed it. Struggled on it the entire time and tried to get un-stuck on the whiteboard. However, the interviewer was visibly annoyed, stared at the ground, I was obviously frustrated that I wasnāt getting it. This completely killed it for me and didnāt help me get out of my rut at all. The second interviewer was not as bad personally but asked some really terrible questions (in my opinion). I was coding on typescript and the second interviewer asked me a question that involved some specific network knowledge and was a bit manipulation problem. After explaining the networking knowledge I missed to understand the problem, I had no idea how to even do any bit manipulation in and just asked him to move on to the next question. The second question was a very standard, LC medium graph based question. I thought: āFinally, a problem I can actually do well on!ā. As I begin to tackle it, the interviewer interrupts me and we spend 15 minutes talking about how I could make my data structure smaller. I really had no idea what he was looking for but he eventually wanted me to just use arrays for everything instead of using objects which would have worked much better for the graph problem. But by that point, he had spent too much time pushing me on this point that I only got half the problem doneā¦ Got rejected after waiting a week by an auto-generated email. Holy fuck Iād never wanna work there based of that one interview. *Dropbox* Was super impressed by the onsite. Seems like a really cool place to work. Thought I did pretty well but I actually got rejected. That one hurt and my confidence was kinda slipping at that point. *Google* Pretty standard stuff. The SLU campus is super nice. All the coding questions were more ānormalā and felt like LC mediums to me. My design question was a bit out thereā¦ Very abstract and I struggled to understand exactly what the interviewer was even looking for. Didnāt bomb any question and I think I came up with optimal solutions for every problem. There were one or two bugs I know about that occurred in the last interview. Overall it was a pretty good experience and I got an L4 offer. *Lyft* Interesting interview. Most of it was pretty normal. My lunch buddy was interesting.. He didnāt seem to like the company very much. Lyft has no whiteboard problems. You get about an hour and a half to solve a problem. The interviewer actually leaves the room and you jam on your keyboard to make an actual, functional program. I completely bombed it however due to a typo right at the start that I completely missed due to the stress (both words looked really similar and I missed the error so I wasted about a third of the time right at the start of the problem). The kicker: Never got contacted after the interviewā¦ Over two weeks went by and no one told me how I didā¦ And after emailing the recruiter, they set time for a follow up conversation yet never called at the agreed timeā¦. Probably a good window into the state of the company. *Facebook* I was really impressed by Facebook. Everyone was really nice and I completely killed the interview. It was really intense. The system design was very applied and I really got to own the direction and state what features Iād develop. Completely killed the question. Coding also went really well. There was three rounds of coding on the whiteboard (facebook will not let you use a laptop). Each session is only 40 minutes after the intro and you are given 2 questions per session. I didnāt flop any of the questions and was able to answer every single one. 4 of them I was able to code the optimal solution. 1 problem required a small hint for me to find the optimal solution, and 1 problem I coded a complete brute force solution that would have never actually worked past a very small sub-set (however I called out that it was a dynamic programming problem but I just wasnāt seeing the pattern). I actually landed an E5 offer! *Snap* The final interview. At this point I was really dead and almost wanted to cancel but I am super glad I soldiered through as this landed me a strong offer. Snap really cares about your interest in their product so make sure you study it. I am not an active snap userā¦ So it was a little hard to be genuine. Everything was pretty straightforward and I got asked some pretty tough questions. Didnāt bomb anything. Got an offer at Snap as well. *Current TC* I made a big mistake when joining Amazon a little over a year and a half ago; accepted an SDE 1 offer. While I was top of band SDE 1, it really screwed me. But it was my fault because I didnāt prep enough and didnāt have completing offers. But it did get my foot in the door. SDE I TC: 145k After 9 months, I was able to get promoted to SDE II. This was because I was performing as an SDE II from the moment I walked in the door. SDE II TC: 165k However, my TC was completely out of wack compared to outside offers and I was able to more than double itā¦ *Offers* Snap: Base: 190k Stock: 750k / 4 Years Facebook (E5) Base: 200k Stock: 600K / 4 years Sign-on: 20K (but I got this to 75K as a condition of signing an offer). Bonus: 15% Google (L4): Base: 155kĀ Stock: 435kĀ / 4 years Sign on: 20kĀ Bonus: 15%Ā During the entire offer stage, I was moving back and forth between recruiters and making sure they each knew about the verbal offers I was getting from the other. Snap did exactly what I hoped and landing the E5 at facebook got me a deal I never thought was possible. Google unfortunately couldnāt get close to the FB offer so I pulled the trigger on Facebook! After added facebook refreshers, Iāll be getting around a 150% raise. All in all, I didnāt ace all my interviews, made some big mistakes, but played my cards right and now Iāve just signed an offer for more money than I ever thought possible. It just takes a shit ton of leet code. This process also drastically increased my compassion for candidates. I now go well out of my way to be nice and show compassion to candidates I may be interviewing. Itās so damn stressful. At the end of the day, even if you prep like hell, thereās an awful lot of variability in this entire processā¦. TC: 380 Good luck!
OP did you complete the interview, can I DM you
Yes you can ping me
OP can I dm you for interview related questions?
I posted about my Facebook interview experience titled "6 on-sites in 2 weeks - My blind adventure". Just search for "my blind adventure"