Interviewing at Facebook / META !? (What they don’t tell you..)

hi friends welcome to my channel this is where i discuss tech and travel today i wanted to talk about my interview process at facebook or i guess now it's meta i interviewed with facebook in october and november of 2021 i wanted to make the interview experience a little bit more transparent for you today i'll be covering topics such as how did i get that initial interview what was the first round like what was the final round like and kind of a little bit more about the resources that facebook actually supplied to me in order to do well in that interview process and if you like this video so far please wait until the end because i will have a big reveal over whether or not i actually got that offer at facebook but you're gonna have to keep watching until the end and please don't miss any of my little steps or tidbits because i'm sure it'll be really helpful in your process when you're interviewing at facebook but before we get into it like and subscribe if you like this video i really appreciate it it helps me out a lot and it motivates me to continue making more videos and with that let's get started okay so the first step of the process involved either applying or getting recruited by a recruiter on linkedin so i know some people go through that process of sending their application in online which again i've talked about this in previous videos you can check out my video above about my interview experience at 10 separate fang and big tech companies basically what happened is i got recruited by a recruiter and my chances of actually getting to that final round increased significantly just because you're competing with so many other people when you apply online that is a lot easier to just get that connection right away through linkedin so anyways i got my connection through linkedin a recruiter reached out to me i want to say in september or october of 2021 um and they just mentioned to me like hey your profile looks like a great fit for the company i would love to set up some time and talk with you so i set up some time with the recruiter and we chatted it was pretty much a standard just like a phone screen to make sure that there weren't any red flags so he asked me questions like you know what's your past experience um how many years of experience do you have what kind of projects did you do he didn't really focus too much on the projects just because i had had three years of experience in the industry at that point so i mostly just talked about like the company that i was currently working at as well as the projects that i was working on there and the different tech stack that i was working on as well as what kind of a leader i was within the workplace so that was pretty much it after that he just said all right let's set up that date for a first round interview and i was like alright so we set up a date for a first first-round interview about a few weeks later i still needed time to prep for that interview and so um he gave me a little bit of extra time for that so once he moved me forward in the process and just a disclaimer i was actually really impressed with like facebook's process compared to all the other meg and big tech companies that i interviewed at of course everyone had their own version of what i'm about to tell you but what facebook had was they set you up with a career portal so if you're a candidate who is in the process of interviewing what they do is is they have a very clear ui for you to log into and check the status of your interview it also shows your current and future interviewers so for example if you interview and um you want to send your interviewer a note afterwards just thanking them for everything you can just easily click on their name and just send a quick thank you note and it'll email them without you having to exchange any emails the other thing is it also gives you practice problems so when i got up set up with that career profile they're pretty serious about you practicing specific problems at a certain pace so at facebook unlike maybe a google or an apple or even a microsoft they focus more on speed versus perfection obviously they want you to get pretty darn close to the answer but they focus more on speed so what i mean by that is they actually expect you to solve two problems within 40 minutes whereas a lot of other companies might just ask you one problem within 40 minutes so that was a little bit different and they catered their practice problems to trying to finish each in 20 minutes another resource in the career portal was also just like different documentation and also different videos detailing what the system design interview would be like what the coding questions might be like and what the expectations are so if you've read cracking the coding interview book gail mcdowell actually wrote that book and they have a few videos of her when she came to the facebook campus and kind of talked through the different steps that she would try to look for as an interviewer there has to be enough signals to pass through onto the next round or get that offer if you're not communicating then the interviewer can never really tell if there is the right signals because they don't know what you're thinking anyways so i had that career portal at my disposal and i definitely took advantage of it i did a bunch of the practice problems some of them had solutions um they weren't really on the internet which was interesting so they were unique problems uh to facebook and i was practicing those there were different versions online so i could kind of look into it if i didn't understand the question and then i also looked at the documents they gave the different resources such as the videos that i was telling you about and that kind of helped me in my preparation journey so the day of the first round interview came and i already knew the format so basically what it was gonna be was a 45 minute interview where i got 40 minutes to complete two questions so i went into the interview it was all over zoom you know it's during covid so i wasn't able to actually get invited to campus or anything but we met on zoom and kind of just chatted for like a minute but right away i could tell the atmosphere in the room was a little bit tense i don't know if tense is the right word but it was definitely not a super friendly conversation we were getting right down to business my interviewer said all right you have 40 minutes to solve two questions if you don't finish the first question in 20 minutes we're just gonna move on to the next question so i was like all right i have my game face on let's go let's try to get this one done so she gave me the first question and it was actually a question that i had seen on leap code before pretty similar um it was probably like a medium question i got started with it i was very communicative i kind of talked through my thought process because i like to ask clarifying questions just to make sure that there's no ambiguity between what she's telling me and what i'm understanding so i asked questions and then i kind of told her like okay this is what i think i'll do in order to solve the problem can i get started and she was like yep get started got started and i started coding the problem and it was going well until the end of the problem when i realized oh no if i test this i don't think it'll work i think there's a bug in my code and i think it's not just some sort of like extreme edge case it's something that could happen pretty frequently depending on the inputs that i receive so i let her know like hey i want to backtrack a little bit because i just found a bug and she seemed pretty pleased with that because it looks like she'd seen the bug as well so i backtracked and just completed the problem in the best way possible i only had a couple of minutes left at this point until moving on to the second problem so she said okay like let's run through one test case once i had finished coding that entire problem up so we ran through one test case and it ended up working and the code didn't compile necessarily but you can run through a test case by specifying your inputs and then just like walking through the problem and writing down the output based on the inputs that you give your program so that's what i did and then i did it with another edge case example and it also ended up working so i was pretty pleased with that and we moved on to the second question so she asked me the second question and it's funny because her second question that she asked me in this first round interview was very similar to a final round question that i got at amazon so i also felt pretty good about this it was a classic interview question if you look up specific algorithms and data structures it'll definitely pop up on the list i can't give the actual problem but it was a problem that i was familiar with and so i kind of raced through it um i made sure there weren't any bugs um again i talked through my steps i didn't necessarily just start coding right away even if you think you know the exact answer to a problem you should definitely still ask questions first just to clear the air of any ambiguity and it also shows that you don't just jump into things you make sure that you have all of the business requirements up front so i made sure i had all the business requirements and then i coded through the problem she seemed to like it i used java by the way that was pretty much it so despite her liking um or me thinking that she liked both of my problems that i had completed at the end of the interview she was still very neutral in her expression so it made me a little bit nervous because i wasn't quite sure if she was completely satisfied like was solving the problem enough maybe i wasn't exhibiting certain leadership skills or i wasn't exhibiting the right signals so i was still a little bit nervous because i couldn't tell what she was thinking or if she was going to pass me but i thanked her for her time anyways and then i just hung tight and waited for the result so then afterwards a few days later my recruiter reached out to me and he actually just messaged me again on linkedin versus calling me so i was a little bit nervous because i figured that he would call me if it was a positive result but he messaged me and said hey i have your results when's a good time to chat so he did want to talk and we ended up setting up a time and getting on a phone call so when we were on that phone call he asked me how do you think it went and i said i think it went well but i couldn't really tell based on my interviewer if she was going to pass me or not and so he said well congratulations you did pass and that made me feel so relieved he said that he was excited to move me forward to the next round which actually was the final round and he was going to move me forward in my career portal so more resources would be available for that final round i'll skip all of that preparation between my first round and my final round maybe i'll have a separate video on that but basically the day came for my final round interview and the format of the final round interview is it's basically a five hour day where you have four interviews and then you have breaks in between each interview which was really nice because some companies again had not given me any breaks between interviews and those final round interviews are very long so anyways i had my final round interview two of the interviews were going to be coding rounds one was a behavioral and one was a system design now if you have been in the industry for multiple years you'll probably get some version of a system design interview at one of the fang or big tech companies if you don't have a lot of experience you probably won't be asked a system design interview question you may be asked an object-oriented programming question but again i haven't actually interviewed with those companies until after i've had experience so you would have to probably google that i went into that final round interview very nervous i actually had another interview with the big tech company the week after that so i felt as though okay i have nothing to lose i'm just gonna go into this and see what happens so i went into it and the first round of the day was a coding round so it was pretty much the same format in the sense that you had 40 minutes to complete two questions and surprisingly i had been asked hard questions before and final rounds but this round they didn't ask me any hard questions which i guess kind of makes sense because you have to finish two questions in 40 minutes so i got two medium questions i had seen both of those questions or some version of those questions before i kind of did my routine where i asked questions to clarify any ambiguity and then i communicated with my interviewer about what i think i'm going to do in order to tackle the problem he gave me the go-ahead and then i went forward and coded it out in java and we talked through the solution ran a test case and he seemed pleased then he asked me another question this was also a medium question and kind of the same thing like i felt as though that entire round went really well and it surpassed my expectations i honestly didn't think it would have gone that well so i was excited i was happy and i basically got out of that round feeling really good i actually had an hour break between that round and my next round so i just kind of hung out eased my nerves drank some tea and then i went into that second round so the second round was another coding round so i went into that coding round and i felt very confident because of my previous coding round um and he asked me my first question same format two questions 40 minutes they were medium questions and the question that he asked me i had seen before a long time ago but i completely choked like this is the definition of choking i had seen the problem before i had solved it before and i knew exactly what to do when i had solved it and i looked at it and just complete blank expression i had no idea how to how to solve it i was just perplexed i was just really confused i started kind of asking my clarifying questions that's what i always do sometimes it also helps to ask questions because it stalls for time um so i started doing that and like thinking through okay how am i gonna solve this problem it probably didn't help that my interviewer was very intense and stoic and expressionless that always makes me a little bit nervous but again everyone has that same experience um so basically i went through my whole process of asking questions and then i proceeded to try to conceptually solve the problem he wasn't super convinced with my way of doing it so he actually did try to drop a hint and i tried to work with him through that hint but it just wasn't clicking for me it was one of those moments where i just my heart sank because i knew there's only two coding rounds in this entire process right so if i fail one of the coding rounds that's like a 50 chance of me definitely not getting in because i'm assuming that they want you to be stellar in those two coding rounds so i went through that process i got something down but again he wasn't very convinced he kept questioning my method and he was right i mean i wasn't doing it correctly basically it was a common problem that i should have probably known then the second question um i solved that but what he wanted me to do once i solved it was to optimize on top of that and so my optimization wasn't quite working um and i kept trying to brainstorm ways to optimize and i just couldn't think of any way so again i solved it but in a brute forcey way and he wasn't completely satisfied i walked out of that interview feeling dejected demoralized completely the opposite of my first round interview where i felt very confident in my answers so it was kind of a toss-up and at that point i just grabbed that attitude of you know what let's just see what happens maybe i've failed the entire interview process because of this one round but let me go through the behavioral and system design interview and just see how that goes oh i went through the behavioral round next and i had had like a 15 minute break between this round and the next so i had to just completely just forget about that past experience and start a fresh new slate clean new slate so i went into that round and i started talking with the interviewer it was funny because my first thought was oh my gosh this guy speaks and looks a lot like mark zuckerberg i was like am i being interviewed by mark but no it was just me being a little bit nervous the guy's name was completely different um but it was really interesting to go through the process he asked me um pretty normal questions like what my work experience was specific projects i had worked on the technicalities of different things that i was working on my leadership skills and i typically do well in behavioral interviews i felt as though i got along with the interviewer and i really got off on the right foot with him as well so after my behavioral round i went into the system design round and the system design round is always a little bit iffy for me i'm not exactly sure if i'm doing well in those rounds or not i do have some experience with system design but not a lot and i feel like they're typically looking for someone who's a professional in that aspect so i kind of did the typical things where they gave me a problem i asked questions and then i kind of went through the steps of conceptualizing okay this is what the client looks like this is what the server looks like um this is the type of database i want to use what does the data model look like typically the interviewers also like to see things like have a proxy in there do you have some sort of load balancer do you know what those things do and this is just you know information you can get on the internet but basically walking through that entire process understanding what components fit with other components and how data travels back and forth the other thing is facebook like many other big tech and fan companies use distributed systems because they deal with a massive amount of data so you really have to understand scalability and how to scale your system or create it in a way where the data flowing in and out isn't going to break your system based on the millions of requests that you may receive per you know hour or minute i kind of stumbled through that process the best i could i talked out loud i went through that entire process explaining what i thought would work best for these large-scale distributed systems he seemed pretty okay with my answers maybe not ecstatic about it but he didn't seem like he didn't understand or didn't like kind of what i was conceptualizing or talking about i also ended up drawing on not draw i o i can't remember exactly what uh platform we used i drew a bunch of the architecture that i was thinking on that diagram sheet after that i felt pretty okay again i thought that i had failed it because of that one round of not doing that well in the coding interview but i kind of had my hopes up just in case i passed the other rounds and they would overlook that one round and i waited my recruiter actually said that they would get back to me in about 10 to 14 days so it takes a while to get your response back but she actually ended up getting back to me two days later which is you would think a good sign but it's a really bad sign because it means you're a definite no so she got back to me and gave me the bad news of you know what we're not moving forward with the process but we thank you for your time let us know if you would like to interview again in the future kind of that normal spiel and yeah again i felt it it was weird because i knew that i hadn't done that well in the final round because of that one coding interview but also i felt um very appreciated and also i felt very equipped throughout the entire process i felt as though they wanted me to succeed and if i had maybe just pushed a little bit more to learn those other problems and remember those other problems um i would have potentially passed it but that's okay it does come down to problem solving i don't really condone just memorizing problems and so in that moment i had a weakness and it's a learning point for me so yeah that was pretty much it i got rejected from the final round uh interview process at facebook but for me it was a really fun experience it actually was practice for me in order to get my you know final round at microsoft so that ended up kind of working out well for me so thank you for watching i really appreciate it again if you were able to get through this entire video i would love it if you liked and subscribed it really helps me out a lot and it motivates me to make more tech videos and if you have any suggestions on videos for next week please leave a comment below thanks so much see ya

Channel: Pooja Dutt

Views: 43,302

Keywords: interviewing at facebook, interviewing at meta, meta, facebook, interview, tech, faang, big tech, interview tips, interviewing, facebook software engineer, facebook software engineer interview, facebook software engineer intern

Id: NAS-0qhL7sk

Length: 21min 11sec (1271 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 19 2022