Time needed to prepare for FB coding interview
I've recently failed my FB interview for an L6 role (SDE). According to the feedback, my behaviour and design interviews were fine. The problem was with my coding: got "inclined with concerns" for my first task (medium difficulty) and completely failed my second task (hard difficulty). I am not dumb, but I'm not an expert in algorithms either. So, I spent 2 weeks (mostly night/weekend time) to read through all the FB / Google tasks on Leetcode. Obviously, that was not enough. Was that just a bad luck? If not, how much time do people usually spend to pass this interview? And where do they find this time (give up on their current responsibilities, take a vacation / sabbatical)? #fb #facebook
Depends on you. If you aren't great at algorithms I would allow 2 months of pretty solid studying (2-3 hours weekdays, 8+ on weekends).
Is such sort of preparation usual / expected?
For Facebook, yeah
How did you the design rounds? Were you asked to do the numbers at the beginning (e.g: # uniq users and all that) and do drawings online, or just explain components and flows verbally?
They don't ask such questions explicitly, you are supposed to speak about all the requirements, trade offs, numbers, etc by yourself. As for online drawings, they have quite a decent tool for collaborative design.
How did you prepare for system design?
I think your issue was that you just read through problems without actually trying to solve any?
I did solve tasks that were marked as "often asked" ones. Otherwise, I couldn't fit my preparation within 2 weeks. Although, the questions I was asked were far from what Leetcode offered me in his FB/Google section.
Don't they make you wait 1 yr until you could interview again?
idk