Status: Developer with 20 years experience
Position: E5 at Facebook
Location: Virtual (would be working with Menlo Park folks)
Date: March 2021
I had my final round of interviews for a remote position with Facebook last week. The interviews were video calls using CoderPad and Excalidraw.
Coding - 1st Round
- Leftmost Column with a One - https://leetcode.com/problems/leftmost-column-with-at-least-a-one/
- Kth Smallest Element in a Sorted Matrix - https://leetcode.com/problems/kth-smallest-element-in-a-sorted-matrix/
System Design - "Design a Load Balancer"
Behavioral Interview
- Can you tell me about a time you had to overcome obstacles in a project?
- Tell me about a time you had a conflict or disagreement with a colleague.
- Did you ever try to change something outside of your responsibility?
- How do you handle vague requirements in a project?
- There was one coding question at the end which was to convert an array of numbers as characters to an actual integer. So, for example, to convert ['1', '2', '3'] to 123. I'm not sure if there is a similar LC problem.
Coding - 2nd Round
- Merge 2 Sorted Arrays - https://leetcode.com/problems/merge-sorted-array/
- Insert into a Sorted Circular Linked List - https://leetcode.com/problems/insert-into-a-sorted-circular-linked-list/
Product Design - "Design a client library for a mobile phone that downloads media files (image, video, music/sound)."
About a week after the interviews I got a reject email that didn't include any specific feedback. I feel pretty good about the coding rounds. I was able to code solutions for all of them and practicing problems on LC helped. FB also has their own interview prep coding problems but they're generally much easier than the ones on LC.
I'm pretty sure the system and product design rounds were my downfall. I was preparing for designing distributed systems in those rounds so it threw me off when the system design focused only on one particular component of a system and the product design was about something I don't have much experience with. Those 2 rounds were nothing like the system design prep videos I've seen online. I felt very unprepared for those even after about 2 months of preparation. Live and learn, I suppose.