Facebook Software Engineer Interview Preparation – This is for those of you who have yet to start your job search and may be worried that you can’t land a high-tech job without a Stanford CS degree. Someone told you that you’re not good enough to get a job at Microsoft or Facebook.
But I’m here to tell you that you can get the job. Here’s how I landed my dream job at Twitter.
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I didn’t graduate from an Ivy League school. I attended Idaho State College for two years and then pursued a CS degree at a small Catholic college.
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I started studying computer science in my first year of university because I thought it was fun. The only thing that resembled a computer when I was growing up was a Chinese copy of the Nintendo SNES. Even then it broke every time I inserted a cartridge.
When I graduated, I didn’t work. I applied to as many big tech companies as I could and was lucky enough to get a few phone interviews.
At this point, I had no idea what the technical screen would look like, let alone how I should prepare. I went into these interviews expecting the interviewer to ask me what a linked list or binary tree is.
I didn’t get too caught up in whether I was good or not. I knew I could learn things quickly. I just needed a chance.
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What I did next is something I’m particularly proud of. I wrote a simple Python script that collected Craigslist job listings with titles containing keywords from the listing and aggregated the emails into a spreadsheet. For the real war story, you can read the article here.
Craigslist, however, didn’t like people taking down their site. To fix this I ran my script over a VPN and had a timer that paused the script for a few minutes. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked well enough.
I ended up collecting 500 emails from around San Francisco, Portland, Spokane, and Seattle. I filtered the results by specific and new, and continued to improve by adding more and more features.
As it turns out, there were already several bots on the market that crawled Craigslist and sent automated emails. These were mostly offshore companies that wanted to put their company on the American market.
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One of my solutions was to create emails that used keywords included in the subject line of my emails. Then I added more details using the post body to make it more palatable. I ran a quick A/B test and the responses I got increased quite a bit from 2-3% to 10%.
Out of about 500 e-mails, I got about 50 replies, of which a small percentage appeared on the phone screens. I stopped at 500 because I didn’t have time and had to finish the job first. At that moment I was optimizing the results, not reaching them.
Fortunately, I eventually landed a job at a startup in Seattle as a junior software engineer. The startup was in Kirkland at the time, so I had to take a 45-minute bus ride to get there in time for the interview.
Then I stayed there for the next 3.5 years, and learned a lot of things like Amazon AWS, EC2, DynamoDB, SQS, and Docker. I grew up a lot during that time. I learned how to write maintainable modular code. I learned how to think about software design. And I learned how to solve people’s problems.
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I worked next to a group of smart people who worked at Microsoft, Amazon and LinkedIn, and I tried to be a “sponge” in the group. I absorbed anything and everything they threw at me. I think that had a big impact on my career.
During my time at the startup, I worked almost exclusively on backend development, with some development operations in between. I started writing some functions to add/change features that were mostly small scopes. But it was a great opportunity to understand the code base and get some code reviews.
A year later, I started having pieces of the codebase, and then it was up to me to turn a set of features into a service. That was the beginning of the early SOA phase. We started converting various components of the site into services, so I started learning more about RESTful services, authentication, AWS services, pub-sub, distributed systems, and more.
There were many times when I got stuck in analysis paralysis — a situation where I overanalyzed scenarios and became unable to move forward.
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Those hard times were the greatest learning opportunities. I started learning about feature scoping, negotiation, monitoring, alerts, and documentation. Each step of the process revealed more things for me to learn. I grew the most in these 2-3 years, both as an individual and as a software engineer.
After suffering through my first job search, I told myself I needed to prepare for future interviews.
I started preparing the interviews by taking stock of what was good, bad and what I could improve. I have divided it into three categories: data structures, algorithms and system design.
Having worked in PHP for most of my professional career and C++ in college, I wanted to try something a little simpler and more specific for the interview.
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That’s why I chose Python. It’s a great language to learn, easy to pick up, supports many data structures out of the box, and can be written quickly on a whiteboard. I learned Python by going through such YouTube tutorials and reading their documentation. I prefer Python 2.x, but you can choose 2.x or 3.
Also, another reason to choose Python is that it is very readable and easy to write on a whiteboard. Here is a trivial comparison between C++ and Python.
I got feedback from the interviewer to make mistakes during the short interview. In a 45-minute interview, you want to spend most of your time solving a real problem.
Pro tip: Choose a language with fewer words so you can write code faster on the whiteboard.
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I spent about a week doing easy challenges on LeetCode, HackerRank, and Project Euler to get familiar with their interfaces and get used to writing code in Python.
The first week made me aware of my level of competence in certain programming languages. I spent another week doing some design challenges like “design X” and went as wide and deep as I could.
This was a lot of fun for me because I was often looking at iOS apps and trying to figure out how they did it. For example, how would you build Instagram from scratch? (I was asked this on Facebook.)
My background is in API design and service-oriented architecture, so I took this opportunity to show how I would design my version of Instagram. And since I have some iOS programming experience from my side projects, I might talk about callbacks and push/long polls here.
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I started the conversation with a few features I wish my version of Instagram had: likes, photo uploads, and a simple timeline. The feature set allowed me to build a very robust API because I know these scenarios well.
Then I drew some high-level design images, how the client will interact with the backend and how the backend will store the data.
I started small, then added more components where needed and proactively looked for bottlenecks. I’ve made educated guesses (read educated, not blind) about what the conditions will be and how each technology will fit. And just as important what the technologies would be
For example, why would you use Cassandra over MySQL to store certain information (hint: size, development speed, schema views), why would you use OAuth over simple authentication, Redis vs Memcached for data caching, streaming vs batch processing, etc.
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There are a lot of areas to explore here, so an hour session is usually not enough. To answer these questions well, you need to read and learn about trade-offs. Advantages and disadvantages of technologies in industry. For this I recommend a site like HighScalability.
The main thing to know is that these design interviews are about how much you know and how well you know it, and it’s your chance to shine. I watched this YouTube video by a former Facebook engineer on how to solve design problems and it gave me insight that helped me tremendously in design interviews. My two main lessons: do a design interview and show what you know.
I have listed my skill level: data structures (linked list, hash map, binary tree, binary search tree, heap, array), algorithms (binary search, hashing, dynamic programming, sorting) and language specific syntax and libraries (like order ,
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