Promised to give back to the community about my recent interview experience with Facebook. I will not give the exact questions as NDA signed.
Recruiter reached out from LinkedIn, pretty standard process. I asked for 3 weeks preparation time, don't hasitate asking for extra preparation time if you need it.
Phone interview:
Two questions: LC medium
I spent lots of time on the first question, coding, testing. The second question I was only able to provide verbal explaination of how to solve it. Don't be frustrated if you can't solve two questions, solve the question perfectly will still count
Virtual onsite
5 rounds in 1 day, each round 45 minutes, there was 1 hour lunch break.
- Round 1 - Coding
Standard two LC medium questions, was able to solve it pretty quickly and provide test cases with walk through - Round 2 - System design
Frequently asked system design questions, was able to solve, but didn't have enough time to give the trade-off analysis, spent too much time on the Capacity analysis. The trade-off analysis and justifications actually result me in additional system design interview later. - Round 3 - Behavior
Pretty standard behavior questions you can find in https://leetcode.com/discuss/general-discussion/675445/facebook-interview-experiences-all-combined-from-lc-till-date-07-jun-2020 - Round 4 - Coding
Frist question not seen on LC, I spent too much time on the first one, but was eventually able to solve it
Second question LC medium, was able to provide mutiple solutions, and eventually implemented one - Round 5 - Behavior + Coding
Some repeating behavior questions like Round 3, there is one additional LC medium question, was able to solve it pretty quickly and walk through the test cases.
Additional System Design Round
The recruiter called me for another System Design round, because I was not doing so well in the first one. This time spent another week to prepare, walking through all the questions: https://leetcode.com/discuss/general-discussion/675445/facebook-interview-experiences-all-combined-from-lc-till-date-07-jun-2020.
The actual question is not from the list but very similar, was able to do 1. Requirement clarification 2. API design 3. Capacity analysis 4. High Level design 5. Bottlenecks and tradeoffs
Overall experience pretty positive, especially the 1 hour break during the full loop, It was super helpful, I was able to rest a bit because I was too nervous the night before didn't sleep well.
How did I prepare for it?
Resume:
- Keep your LinkedIn up to date if you are looking for a job
Coding:
- Leetcode: Facebook Tag questions rank by frequency
- Break into categories and be sure you don't have missing point, good example of category: https://aaronice.gitbook.io/***/
- I finished the hard collection: https://leetcode.com/explore/interview/card/top-interview-questions-hard/. Not many questions, but these are really helpful as lots of other questions can be derived from here.
- Practice and practice, there is no trick
Behavior
- Prepare for several good cases in your daily work, relate these cases to demostrate your strength
System design
- Course: *** the system design interview
- Book: Designing data-intensive applications
- Practice: https://leetcode.com/discuss/general-discussion/675445/facebook-interview-experiences-all-combined-from-lc-till-date-07-jun-2020
- Some good videos
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9vLsnF6QPYuH51njmIooCQ
Final tip, don't give up. I was failing lots of interviews this year as well before this. So don't give up yourself and eventually you will need just one success.