I was solicited by an FB recruiter through LinkedIn. I followed up, given my perception of FB being fast-paced and having an open culture. After the phone screen (PS), I went on-site for the standard five rounds:

• Behavioral & culture fit
• Coding
• Coding
• Design
• Design

I was never a fan of behavioral questions and never felt such questions were inspirational; FB was no different. There was a quick, 10-minute coding problem near the end of this round. You had no time to think, only to code it up.

The first coding problem was simple but a little tedious to write. The second coding problem was medium difficulty with two parts. The first part was simple, and I quickly coded it. I had to think about the second part to identify the algorithm but had no time to implement it.

In both design rounds, despite the interviewer’s claim that the problem was open-ended without a perfect answer and that the thought process was what mattered, he didn’t really mean it. A solution that perfectly matched what the interviewer had in mind was expected. The interviewer, having graduated from school only a few years back, did not have rich project experience to handle deviations from his standard solution. The interviewer simply liked to move fast on the track of his solution. Any deviation from that track became a distraction instead of part of a true problem-solving process.

Overall, I am disappointed with the FB interview process. The FB interview loop obviously does not truly evaluate and identify problem-solving skills or experiences, but rather how fast you can write bug-free code for simple algorithm problems with little or no time to think. It effectively requires that you have coded the same or a very similar problem very recently. I am confident in my coding and problem-solving skills and like to present my daily true self instead of an interview-prepared me.

FB hires many young graduates and expects them to write code fast. Maybe coding fast and breaking things is fine for web pages, but I suspect how terrible their back-end infrastructure would be due to this code-fast mentality.

Behavioral questions;

Simple to medium algorithm questions;

Design questions;