Facebook | E5 | London [Reject]
Anonymous User
2420

YOE: 11 years
Current Position : Senior Software Engineer at non-FAANG but well known company

Not going to post exact questions due to NDA. But most of my questions were from FB list on LC.

Phone Screen:
Both questions were LC Easy and from FB list. Second question had a DP follow-up but I didn't complete that since we had very few mins left. Feedback was that I did above average. I understood that there was a lot of focus on communication, whether the code was simple and understandable, and whether I came up with good examples and covered all edge cases.

Virtual Onsite:

Coding round 1: 1 LC Easy 1 LC Hard. The hard problem was not from LC but had a similar pattern to another hard question on LC. There were a bunch of follow-up questions on the data structure internal implementation and Big O. We also discussed what other ways this problem could be solved. The interviewer definitely put me at ease and I did really well on this round. Feedback was good too for this round.

Coding round 2: 1 LC Medium 1 LC Hard. Both questions are from FB list. This round was terrible. There were plenty of audio/video issues from the interviewer side and wasn't really communicative at all. I gave a brute force solution for first question. I solved the second question but couldn't explain the complexity well - it was a DP question.

Behavioural:
The intervewier had a huge list of questions that covered most workplace situations and went through most of them. I gave as many examples as I could. I was grilled properly on a few of the answers - interviewer went deep and sought a lot of clarifications. So my suggestion is to be really well prepared. The feedback was that I was good but recommended for E4 than E5.

System Design:
I'm being deliberately vague here - it was to design a system that needs to serve some stats about a website (slight delay is ok) and there will be queries that will ask for data between a give time frame. I nailed the part about serving data given in a given time frame. Did the back of the envelope calculations and gave a high level design to scale. But admittedly I didn't have a lot of time to cover all the areas and reach the part about API and that has costed me this round.

This was my first ever FAANG on-site interview. I had one Google phone interview before this which I didn't make it. Although I feel down about the outcome, it seems to me that I'm making some progress afterall.

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