Facebook Interview Tips and Guidance

I have attended a Facebook interview last year - although I didn't get the job offer, but here is a few tips and guidance that might help you if you are interviewing with Facebook shortly. It might also help you if you are interviewing with other Top Internet/Software companies such as Big4: Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook. Or Big5 - which includes Microsoft.

System Design Interview

In the system-design interview, you will be showcasing building a large distributed system e.g a Whatsapp messenger, a Instagram etc. For example, a Load Balancer is a good concept to dig into. The interviewer is looking for your abilities specifically:

Problem Exploration
How do you handle the data e.g. Relational or Non-relational database
Quantity Analysis: how much traffic/throughput can your system support
Component breakdown
Completeness of your solution
Ability to discuss the tradeoffs between performance and cost of what you build

The system design lasts for 45 minutes. And for the first 5 minutes, you should gather the requirements and asking lots of questions e.g. how many queries per seconds. Then next 10 mins, you should drive the discussion and lead the conversation. Then you are expected to draw on whiteboard the high level design with end-to-end discussions.

Behavior Questions

One important tip is that you should use "I" instead of "We" - and you should use the STAR format to answer the questions: Situation, Task, Action and Result. You should prepare a few stories beforehand. The interviewer is looking specifically for the following:

Proactively working
How you work in a non-structured environment
Growth: it is ok to fail - how do you handle the failure and what have you learned from it?
Communication skills
Conflicts of resolution: medium to large scale conflict - e.g. how you disagree with peer and how you handled the conflicts?
Leadership - technical or mentionship. Have you been a team lead?

Coding Interview Tips

The interviewer is looking specifically for your:

Problem solving skills
Coding ability
Testing and Verification of your solution
Communication skills (how you clarify the question)

There will be 2 coding questions per interview. Each lasts around 20 minutes. You should expect them like medium questions from leetcode or hackerank. When you code, please make sure to explain your thoughts - as this is a communication signal. You are also expected to come up simple and elegant solution - of course to optimised solution.

See more interview tips at this post: Coding Interview Tips for Software Engineers

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