Facebook | E5 | US | June 2021 [Passed]
Anonymous User
2873

I everyone, I'll go thru my interview process with Facebook sharing some details that will help others as I got help from you guys, although I got an offer I'm declining it.

Status: Software engineer with 6+ years of experience (primarly front-end).
Position: E5
Location: Multiple locations (Infraestructure)
Date: June

Technical phone screen 45 minutes:
Algorithms 2 questions:
A) 133. Clone Graph
B) 695. Max Area of Island

Here I was able to complete both questions but due ambiguity I needed a lot of hints, so at the end I was downgraded to E4.

Onsite 4 rounds:
First round:
A) 8. String to Integer (atoi). It was a variation of this, just need to return true or false if can be converted.
B) 304. Range Sum Query 2D - Immutable. Here I achieved a working solution, not an optimal one

Second round:
A) 528. Random Pick with Weight
B) 973. K Closest Points to Origin

Third round:
A) Behavioral, here I felt did not gave a good impression because my shared experiences was about a business that I started with a couple of friends and the examples have all the DONT's for the industry. So we moved to another code challenge:
B) 34. Find First and Last Position of Element in Sorted Array

Fourth and last:
A) System design: Netflix. Here I really have no thoughts to share because was my first time ever in this kind of question and I did not practice just watched videos about the topic...

At the end got an offer to join Rotational SWE Program which it is a good thing because finally you're joining big opportunities but for me won't work.

My advices:

  • Take serioulsy the preparation phase, sometimes you got overwelmed with a lot of things happening, daily job, your life, and feeling of no progress. Just don't give up and seriously don't stop practicing, even if today you just solved one problem that's fine but NEVER stop.
  • Practice, practice, practice, there's no more, so I will highly recommend leetcode premium as you'll have editorial solution and if there's not, go to the comments and search for the efficient solution, I've found sometimes a lot of comments sharing just a working solution and no the efficient one which won't help you at all.
  • Make a list of topics, there's a tons of videos and post giving you an excelent list of selected topics to study and match them with a few problems, don't spend your time solving 20 problems of same topic, I would say 5 is more than enough.
  • Seriously, take your time, this is nothing that you'll perform in 2 weeks, it took me almost 4 months to get my current solving level.
  • If you start getting bored, go to the contests, are very exciting ways to see your improvement.
  • And last but not least, try with leetcode/facebook section but don't stick just there, as I mention topics matters more than just randomly solving.

Best of luck to everybody, and don't give up c:

Comments (6)