| I recently interviewed at Facebook with ~10yrs experience. I didn't get an offer. Their process was really quite rudimentary compared to the other companies I interviewed at, namely Google who I see as their most direct competitor for engineering talent. * Every single coding problem was about iterating over a string or an array and doing something with it. Seemed like there was no coordination at all on what's being asked from one interviewer to the next. For a senior infra engineer interview I'd expect them to touch on concurrency, or service architecture, or recursion, or debugging, or... anything besides strings and arrays (which I'm good at!). * The system design question they asked me was about how to design a frontend feature for live-updating comment chains. I understand the ideal that the questions are so high-level that it's an even playing field regardless of background, but the reality is that every problem is going to be close to _someone's_ domain and far from someone else's. I wish they had chose something at least related to infrastructure services, because I don't even know the 101 on how social media frontends work. * The interviews didn't include any time for me to ask meaningful questions of the interviewers. I was assigned to engineers at random, rather than based on where I'd likely be working. * None of the interviewers conveyed any enthusiasm about giving the interview. I could tell that speaking to me was a chore distracting them from what they wanted to be doing. Overall the process felt haphazard and low-effort, like I was Candidate #24601 in the machine for the week. Stark contrast to Google, where the interviews left me _more_ excited about working there, despite Google being more than twice Facebook's size. Fortunately I didn't get the job so I didn't even have to ponder any ethics questions :^) |