The Facebook Coding Interview

What are people saying about Facebook's Interview

PROS

Amazing training for employees with a great culture. You get to work with very smart people and have the opportunity to make an impact.
Fast promotion if you can work long hours. Fast paced environment, you’ll get to learn new stuff all the time from some of the smartest engineers
The pay is top of market and few can match it. The perks are unbelievable, dozens of different cuisines for lunch, 21 days of PTO, fantastic medical coverage

CONS

Competition is fierce and the company is very sensitive to metrics. There is a lot of direct feedback that may be uncomfortable at first
This is a good place if you want to make money at the cost of work-life balance. Not a place to be innovative, which inherently carries risk and takes time. It’s a risk because if there’s no impact you’ll be fired. Most of the engineers work to satisfy performance reviews.
High profile projects can be extremely political and can really be dragged down by too many cooks in the kitchen

What Facebook employees saying about interviewing?

“Invest time in preparing: It's important for any engineer, even senior ones, to brush up on their interview skills, coding skills and algorithms. An interview is typically different from your day-to-day job. This is the first technical interview in the process, so any preparation for this interview will be beneficial for the next ones.”

“Go over data structures, algorithms and complexity: Be able to discuss the big-O complexity of your approaches. Don't forget to brush up on your data structures like lists, arrays, hash tables, hash maps, stacks, queues, graphs, trees, heaps. Also sorts, searches, and traversals (BFS, DFS). Also review recursion and iterative approaches.”

“The design interview is 45 minutes. These almost never involve coding - you'll spend the interview talking and drawing on the whiteboard. As with all interviews, the interviewer will typically save the last five minutes for your questions. The purpose of the interview is to assess the candidate's ability to solve a non-trivial engineering design problem. To that end, your interviewer will ask you a very broad design problem and evaluate your solution.”

How to prepare for a job interview at Facebook

What are people saying about Facebook's interview?

“I was interviewing specifically for an iOS position. The recruiters start with Obj-C 5 multiple choice questions, which required some surprising depth. I won't get into specifics, but take time to understand memory management (even with arc), blocks, addresses and pointers. ”

“Basic phone screen to initially determine my eligibility. This was followed by a second technical phone interview with an engineer at Facebook. Collabedit was used to allow me to type and the interviewer to review what I was typing. The questions asked of me can be found on Glassdoor - do your research! I made it to an in-person interview where I met first with a technical engineer. More coding, this time on a whiteboard which is really annoying. Made it past that, then met with a manager for lunch to discuss the position a bit further. He asked me typical team, role, and fit related questions.”

“They were very professional, they sent me a lot of emails on how to prepare for the interview at Facebook. First they make a phone interview where they ask a code question and you have about 40 minutes to answer. There was only one thing I was unhappy about, in the live session before the phone interview they said that the most important thing is to solve the problem they asked you, and only then try to improve your code, well in my interview I solved the problem in only 30 minutes but wasn’t able to improve code efficiency in the last 10 minutes.”

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