I was contacted on February 25 via LinkedIn following a recommendation. The position was in the Mobile Operations team. This was followed by a series of phone interviews:

• One with the technical sourcer
• One with the head of the team
• Two more with specialists from various departments

Following the phone interviews, an onsite interview took place in Menlo Park on April 22. Given the 10-hour time zone difference, they were sympathetic with the jet lag and flew me there on Saturday for the Monday interviews. The interview day had five sessions:

• One with the head of the team
• One with members of the team (coding session)
• One with a member of management
• Two more with specialists from other departments (systems and networking)

With the exception of the coding interview, where a second person was there to observe, all other interviews were 1:1.

I flew out on Tuesday, and on Thursday, I received a call stating they were happy with my performance and we could move forward.

I expected a tirade of technical questions. The unexpected part was that the interview was both ways: they interviewed me, and I interviewed them. Most parts were more like brainstorming sessions than exams.

The most difficult question was when a guy showed me a gdb stack trace of the threads within a process that had hung. It was a Facebook internal application, so I had no previous knowledge of that application. The question was, "What went wrong?" Luckily, it was a clear situation where all threads were waiting for a blocked thread.