Status: 12 Years of Experience (Non FAANG)
Position: E5/IC5 at Facebook
Location: Menlo Park, CA
Date: Oct-Nov 2020

Manager phone screen (45 minutes)

• Behavioral/Leadership questions
• Current Experience

Technical phone screen (45 minutes):

• 2 Coding Questions Finished Both questions perfectly (one medium and one hard). Got the feedback the next day that we are moving to Onsite

Onsite (4 rounds)
1st Coding (45 minutes)
- 2 Coding Questions Finished First questions and a little variance perfectly(somewhere between easy and medium), second question(hard) interviewer had difficulty in explaning me the question. I confirmed the question and gave a dfs approach, the interviewer agreed and started coding. Then interviewer told me the code is not going to work for a case, then I stop coding and told that the question the way is phrased is not right. Then I guessed and confirmed what is being asked and made sure the interviewer agree, interviewer agreeded again. I explaned the solution and fixed the code
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2nd Behavior (45 minutes)
- Behavior/Leadership
- 1 Coding Question Finished the question perfectly(medium).
3rd Coding (45 minutes)
- 2 Coding Questions(Acutally 3 questions. 2nd was an extension on top of first and was using the logic built in first question) Finished all three(almost perfectly) (medium and hard). I gave 3 approches to hard question and interviewer asked me to choose my approach and I did and finished coding. There was a bug in my code which we figured out with a use case. Was able to fix the bug instantly and move forward
4th System Design (45 minutes)
- Some Large Scale system design I did average in system design but my feedback came out to be really good.

Got a feedback in 2 days that I am moving to HC. HC was on Monday, on monday got a call that I got the job.

These are very important things that might help one:

• Facebook expects you to finish two questions in all coding rounds perfectly.
• All coding questions were medium-hard covering various topics.(two-pointers, arrays, maps, tree, string, backtracking, priority queues etc.)
• You need to be very clear on how you came up with the approach to the solution and discuss trade offs between approaches(if there are multiple).
• If you are looking for what questions were asked you probably are not ready. Some questions were not in leet code and I havn't seen them before.(Seen questions were among top 100 tagged medium,hard questions)
• One important thing, not to get into the trap of trying to remember how you have solved the question in the past. Try to solve the question as if you are looking at a new problem.
• The questions asked are generally not trick question.
• And you don't have 45 minutes to do two questions, 10 minutes are gone in introduction and chit chat. Coming up with the approach(2-3 minutes), explaining the approach(2 minutes), coding the solution(10 minutes), and testing it(2-3 minutes)
• Doing more questions is NOT a sure shot route to success.
• Doing same question with all possible ways helps a lot.

My Prep:

• I have done approximately 500 LeetCode questions (more than 60% are medium).
• For first month or so I worked on questions by topic from the "Explore" section. And made sure am at 30-40% in each and every section.
• Then I did questions by frequency.
• For last 21 days or so I only did mock interviews(from the mock interview section).
• I am not an exceptional candidate but I am very consistent and disciplined, which helped my preparation a lot.
• For System design, I saw a ton of youtube vidoes and read about all large scale systems that we use everyday.
• Initially I did a lot of recursion, dfs and bfs questions, before diving into different topics (still struggle with DP questions :) )
• Find a prep buddy if you can, it will change and challenge the way you are prepping(ofcourse the buddy needs to be fully committed like you are). I had the luxury to have a prep buddy, possible the best one !!!

I hope someone finds this post helpful. Good Luck and happy coding !!!!
Compensation Details : https://leetcode.com/discuss/compensation/959634/Facebook-or-E5IC5-or-Menlo-Park-CA