I was initially contacted by Facebook via a LinkedIn message. They found my resume online and thought I would be a good fit for their Site Reliability Engineer position. They asked if the position interested me, and I said that it did. They scheduled a phone interview for a week later.

The phone interview consisted of some technical questions, and I had mixed results on those. I did not feel that I did my best, especially since I don't particularly enjoy coding in front of someone without any reference material. However, I was informed a few days later that they would like a second phone interview with me.

I was surprised, and I accepted the next step in the process. Later the same day, they contacted me again to say they would rather bring me in for an onsite interview immediately instead of going through the second phone interview. I was surprised, but I accepted the offer and set up the travel dates shortly thereafter.

On the morning of the interview, I underestimated the amount of time required to drive from Palo Alto to Menlo Park at 9:30 am, and I arrived 5 minutes late to the interview. That was a terrible way to start the day, and I wondered if that would knock me out of the running immediately. Coming from rural NH, I was not used to heavy commuting traffic, but it was still inexcusable, and I felt defensive and angry at myself the rest of the day—not a great way to enter an interview with any company, let alone Facebook!

Most of the interviews went reasonably well, including programming aptitude and the manager interview. Two of the interviews went less well: networking knowledge and, most pointedly, system architecture. The system architecture interviewer was somewhat unfriendly, but perhaps not on purpose if it was his true personality, and the interview included a "shadow" interviewer who didn't ask questions and only participated minimally.

I had my most difficulty with this interview and did not do well with the "what if?" questions in general. I was disappointed with myself because I have thought of myself as someone who can design systems, but perhaps not at the scale that Facebook is looking for. At any rate, I was struggling with one question during the interview and said something like, "Well, you could do...." I know that was a bad answer and wishy-washy, but the interviewer turned to his "shadow" with a wry smile and said in a sidebar, "Well, of course you could do...." I thought that was unprofessional and disrespectful, but tried to soldier on as best as I could. At the end of that interview, I could tell that I was not prepared well enough for it and felt that I had performed poorly on that one.

I sent thank you emails to as many of the folks as I could, but when I could not find email addresses for some of them, I asked the recruiter for the rest of the addresses. Surprisingly, she replied that she "couldn't reveal personal email addresses at the company." I found that to be very strange, since some Facebook employee email addresses are found easily by Googling their names. She requested that I forward my thank you emails to her for each person, and she would resend them internally. Again, I found that to be a strange request, but I complied. I did not receive any confirmation of receipt from her nor from the folks that I attempted to thank, but at that point, I was convinced that it didn't matter anyway.

I was told that I would hear back from them by the following Friday, but that day came and went with no contact. Finally, I received a call from the recruiter the next week, and I was told that they were no longer interested due to my difficulties with the networking and system architecture interviews.

I take responsibility for arriving late to the interview and do not plan on letting that happen for any future interviews. I'll never know if that had something to do with the negative response from them, but it certainly didn't help my chances! I was disappointed with some of the employee interactions, but I guess I'll just chalk that up to having a thin skin that day and being on the defensive because I had already messed up by arriving late.

What is your favorite networking protocol?

What do you like about it and what don't you like about it?