[milkbikis]

Hi! Just pitching in here as an outsider who has interviewed twice with Facebook and talked to quite a few others (mostly fresh graduates) who have. I did not receive an offer on both occasions, but I'll try to remain unbiased. I did receive an offer from Google and Quora, if it helps.

Facebook's interview process seems to have a very high variance in terms of candidates' experiences about the process. In the telephone rounds, collabedit often has sync issues, which can be quite stressful for first timers. Occasionally, interviewers either do not speak clearly, keep moving away from the speakerphone or have a very difficult to understand accent (not sure how to solve this one). These two things compounded together have caused several people I know to have a terrible experience in the first round, and it appears that these issues are not taken into consideration when making a final decision, as was the case for me. I had two phone interviews because the first one had these issues. I was called to the campus for the final interviews, which I would certainly describe as "code problems", or more accurately as algorithm based problems. I actually found these interviews to be easier than the phone rounds, which was a common opinion among the other candidates I met. I was quite surprised to not get an offer and my guess is that the botched phone round had an effect, but I may be wrong.

This is intended as honest feedback rather than a sour grapes reaction to not being extended an offer. I have interviewed with several other companies and usually the experience is either consistently good or consistently bad, which at least gives the candidates a fair playing field. My guess would be that this feedback is getting ignored because it primarily comes from rejected candidates.

Finally, it would be great if software companies started sharing feedback about candidates' performance if they don't receive an offer instead of a cliched e-mail. Quora seems to be the only one doing this at the moment: https://www.quora.com/Quora-Recruiting/Can-I-get-the-feedbac...