Update: I have been careful enough not to leak any confidential information after signing the NDA (non-disclouse agreement) with Facebook. I think, the NDA refers to confidential information such as the important projects ongoing by company, but sharing the personal experience is fine.

9 Years ago, I applied to Facebook USA when I was about to graduate my PhD, unfortnately, I did not get to the final interview stage (to be fair, I am far more skilled than I was 9 years ago).

A few weeks ago, I applied to Facebook London for the position of Software Engineer, and quickly I was contacted by the FB Recruiter for an initial chat. Soon I had the telephone coding interview with one of the FB engineers in London.

Unlike some other companies like General Electric (who have roles for System Architects), every software engineers in Facebook are deemed qualified System Architects who should be able to design and implement products. Maybe that is why the interviews are so tough.

The telphone screening interview lasts for 45 minutes. As expected, I was asked to complete a coding exercise during the interview. A link of coderpad.io is given in advance. I was also given the following friendly reminders prior to the interview.

• Make sure you’re in a quiet environment.
• Double check that you’re on a reliable phone line.
• Please familiarize yourself with CoderPad so that you’re prepared to dive in during the interview.
• We encourage you to use a headset during the interview so that you may freely code and talk at the same time.
• It’s okay to ask the interviewer to speak slowly if you can’t catch what they’re saying.

Additional Information
Some interviews will include 2 people. Don’t worry – one will be there purely for training purposes.

We look forward to discussing your work experience, but do not want you to disclose or use confidential information obtained from a current or prior employer. Please be mindful of any confidentiality agreements you may have with current or former employers.

This ‘telephone’ interview also requires you to turn on the web-camera so that you can see and interact with the interviewer. And for coding interview, it is done via the online collaboration editor – coderpad.io – which is the following:

The coderpad.io does not provide the real time code execution (unlike the Microsoft’s interview experience), however, the interviewer is more interested in how you approach to solving the puzzles and run you test cases mannually. Without the ‘compile and run’ button in the browser, you are closer to the experience of writing code on the white board, which you also need to practice and make sure your code does get compiled, executed, and produce correct results (NOT psuedo-code).

Algorithm Complexity is discussed at the interview. You are supposed to give a few test cases – don’t forget the corner cases.

There are two coding puzzles – the first one is trivial – quite basic, the difficulty is quite similar to this puzzle: checking a string if it is a palindrome) and the second one is more about a design/coding problem (for example, design a container that can return a random element in constant time). Both problems can be found on leetcode and hackerrank – so a good advice for you: practice, practice and practice a little bit more!

Luckily, it seems that I did well in the initial FB coding interview and I was given positive feedbacks (with a tiny advice regarding testcases) later by the FB recruiter before confirming an on-site interview in London!

–EOF (The Ultimate Computing & Technology Blog) —

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