Facebook Interview Experience: A Personal Reflection

When it comes to the interview process, Facebook is quite transparent. Anyone can find plenty of details by searching for 'Facebook interview process.' However, my experience stands out as particularly favorable, even when compared to interviews at other major tech companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Palantir, and Amadeus.

Stage 1: Initial Technical Screen

The initial technical screen at Facebook is primarily a coding interview. The focus is on evaluating your coding capabilities to determine if you can move on to the onsite interview stage.

Stage 2: Onsite Interviews

At the onsite stage, you will have multiple interviews focused on various aspects of your skills and capabilities. For engineers, you will typically have 4 or 5 interviews covering different topics:

Coding Topics: These will include algorithm and data structure questions to assess your problem-solving skills. Design Topics: Questions around system design may be asked to evaluate your understanding of scalability and architecture. Behavioral Topics: These often involve questions about your past experiences and how you handled specific situations.

Each stage is designed to give a comprehensive understanding of your skills and how you would fit into the organization.

Personal Experience and Insights

Out of all the companies where I interviewed, my experience with Facebook was my favorite. Here are some insights that I have gathered:

Recruitment Experience

My recruiter, Ollie, was straightforward and helpful. He provided detailed feedback from my interviews, something that no other company did. I appreciated this feedback regardless of my final outcome. Ollie also sent me amazing study materials for my system design interview, which was very helpful.

Ollie was always quick to respond to my emails, helping me expedite the process when I was almost done with my interviews at other companies. I always received results/feedback within 2 or 3 business days, and the emails were always personalized, not cookie-cutter responses. This made the process more engaging and less impersonal.

Interview Logistics

The hotel booked for my onsite interviews in London was great, and the timing of my interview on ‘fish and chips day’ was a delightful touch. This thoughtful gesture made the experience more memorable and enjoyable.

During the interviews, all my interviewers were friendly and polite. The only exception was the interviewer for the system design interview, who seemed less enthusiastic. However, he still provided positive feedback and recommended a hire, so I found his style to be acceptable.

Although I enjoyed the coding problems at Palantir, I found the debugging codebase at Facebook fun. The algorithm problems were similar to Facebook’s but were framed within a real-world context, which I appreciated.

Conclusion

The process at Facebook made me extremely excited to join the company, and I am eagerly looking forward to starting there. The combination of thorough feedback, personalized support, and engaging interview experiences made my time with Facebook stand out among other interviews.

Note: All opinions expressed here are my own and do not represent the views of my past, present, or future employers.