Career

This is How Facebook Hires Software Engineers

Photo By – Andrewfeinberg

We already know Facebook pays ton of money for Interns and Software Engineers.

When they pay ton of money, then you would expect they hire only top class employees right?

Carlos Bueno, engineer shared details on hiring process at Facebook for software engineers and other technical positions.

Hiring process followed at Facebook is typical with other companies – Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, etc.

You will get the gist of  the hiring process for Software Engineers in U.S. based companies from this  writeup from Facebook engineer.

Overview of Hiring at Facebook

  • Phone screen / Onsite
  • Onsite Loop
  • What we look for

Phone Screen / Onsite Interview

  • For phone screens, make sure you are in a quiet place with a good internet connection.
  • Phone Screen is about 45 minutes.
  • The bulk of the time is spent on coding exercises. The interviewer will send you a link to a collaborative editor and ask you to solve some programming problems. More about that in a sec.
  • Impress us with your mastery of whatever language you’re best at. Don’t use a language you know less well because it’s trendy or you think it will please the interviewer.

Onsite Loop

  • After you have cleared the Phone screen round, you will have a onsite interview.
  • The loop is several interviews back-to-back on the same day, usually with a lunch break.
  • You will likely be asked to write code on a whiteboard.

Requirements

During Onsite interview Facebook looks for

  • Fit
  • Generalism
  • Architecture
  • Coding

Coding

  • The coding questions are contrived.
  • They have to be simple enough to explain in a few minutes and solvable in 10 to 30 minutes. But they must also require knowledge, skill, and concentration to solve.
  •  Good coding problems are fractal in nature.
  • They can be extended arbitrarily to gauge the depth of your knowledge.
  • For example, you might be asked to solve a problem any way you want. Then you’ll be asked to solve it again in constant space or sub-linear time.

How to Prepare for the Interview

More generally, skills on your resume are fair game.

If it says “expert in X,” we will try to schedule you with a proven expert in X, so be prepared.

If you are not, leave it off. I’d rather have a short list of the things you’re awesome at than pages of everything you’ve ever done.

Hard training makes for an easy battle. Brush up on techniques that you may not use every day, but are very useful when you need them: recursion, graph theory, tree traversal, combinatorial problems, etc

*****

Now, you get the idea about how to prepare for job interview at Facebook.

At the end of article, Carlos closes with following sentence

Carlos Bueno, an engineer at Facebook, knows how to move Mt. Fuji.

Do you know what does “How to move Mt.Fiji” mean?

It’s the title of the book – How Would You Move Mount Fuji?

Microsoft’s interview process is a notoriously grueling sequence of brain-busting questions that separate the most creative thinkers from the merely brilliant. So effective is their technique that other leading corporations–from the high-tech industry to consulting and financial services–are modeling their own hiring practices on Bill Gates’ unique approach.

How Would You Move Mount Fuji? reveals for the first time more than 35 of Microsoft’s puzzles and riddles.

Before Facebook and Amazon, Microsoft “the place to work” for tech geeks.  Then game Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.

Question To You

How do you compare the hiring process with Facebook to your company (onsite, on-campus, etc)?

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4 Comments

    1. Our interview process is nothing when compared to this.But it is very useful as it set me a goal to improve my knowledge to that level where i can face a facebook interview…..!

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