Overall, it was an AWESOME experience.

My friend referred me, and a recruiter reached out within a week on January 18th. They initially scheduled a phone screen for January 23rd, but I was told I could skip it on January 22nd. The reason wasn't provided, but I'm very sure it was due to the strong internal referral from my ex-coworker, who is also my good friend.

The onsite interview was scheduled for January 30th. It consisted of five sessions: two coding interviews, two career discussion + coding interviews, and one system design interview.

The system design interview was very interesting. This was my first time doing system design interviews, as they were targeting me for E4. The interviewer asked me to design a domain-specific system, but I didn't have any specific experience in that field. He was cool with that and made the question general enough for me to build my solution and showcase my system design skills. A great tip for system design interviews was to do a mock interview with a friend. The Facebook recruiter also sent out useful information on how to prepare for system design interviews, which was super helpful.

If I had to name one thing I didn't like that much, it was the two career discussion + coding sessions. It was a bit too much, as the career discussion part took almost 40 minutes. I ended up speaking for 80 minutes non-stop, which was tiring. Honestly, I think one career discussion + coding session would have been enough. There was really no point to having two. The 5-minute coding was also rushed, leaving no time to walk through my code. One of the interviewers said, "You don't have to explain to me" when I was doing the coding part, which was a head-scratcher. I'm an interviewer myself, and a significant part of a technical interview is expecting candidates to communicate well.

The two coding interviews went well. The first interviewer thought I was too quick, and we ended up solving three questions in one interview. I don't know if he suspected I had seen the questions before (which I hadn't), so he had to ask two additional ones. The second interviewer asked a relatively more complex question than the first, but it was a practical question, and as long as you are comfortable with algorithms and data structures, you'll be fine. They were apparently disallowed from asking brain teasers.

I also had an additional exploratory chat that I requested with a manager from WhatsApp, who walked me out of the MPK 12 building.

My recruiter friend touched base with me three days later (February 2nd, Friday) and told me that my overall feedback looked good (sounding intentionally vague). We were moving to the two approval meetings on the following Monday and Tuesday. I was informed that my offer was approved on Tuesday afternoon.

My recruiter friend then helped me schedule calls with different team managers. I was very interested in talking with a director at Instagram, which I'm a super fan of. After a series of phone calls, my recruiter called again and spent an hour helping me get my questions answered. The discussion was transparent and smooth. We also talked about career development, team selection, and the offer competition process, as I had also received an offer from Google by then.

I actually made the final decision before the final offer numbers came out. Of course, I didn't tell them my final decision until offer competition was finished because I wanted to get more if possible. The main factors that drove me to choose Facebook were:

• The impact-driven culture. Note that I don't think this culture fits everyone, but it fits me very well because I'm passionate about impacting and leading people around me. I'm an ambitious person career-wise, so an impactful and competitive working environment is my catalyst.
• The ultimate flexibility of team mobility. Their boot camp program ensures you're working in a team you're happy with (at least in the mid-term), and you're encouraged to switch teams if you're unhappy after a certain period. They also have a program called HackerMonth (I might be misspelling it) that allows you to try working in another team for a month each year.
• Great recruiting experience. Choosing between Google and Facebook was VERY hard, and one of the factors that drove me towards Facebook was their recruiting experience. The recruiter was super engaging and extremely responsive, even responding on Sunday night. Recruiting experience might highly depend on the specific recruiter you get, though.

I'd definitely recommend engineers passionate about building to try Facebook. It's a unique experience that I felt so grateful to have.

Signed NDA