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Facebook Software Engineer Interview Questions & Reviews

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Web: www.facebook.com | HQ: Menlo Park, CA

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Updated Feb 9, 2012 – Interview questions and reviews posted anonymously by interview candidates.

Difficulty Rating [?] Based on 78 ratings

3.1

“Average” Interview

Interview Experience [?] Based on 78 ratings

Positive	36%
Neutral	44%
Negative	21%

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2.0

Easy Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Sep 2011 (took a day)

Asked to code in phone screen. Given two sorted arrays, do intersection or arrays in most efficient manner. I implemented it in using just one while loop, but missed to check NULL condition on the second array and got rejected! :(

Other Details

The interview consisted of a Phone Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Oct 2011 (took 4+ weeks)

The recruiter asked me if I would like to do a phone screen or go to the Facebook office and have a face to face interview. I chose the latter. I went there on time. They had asked me to bring the signed copy of the NDA which I did. I spoke to the recruiting coordinator and the interview with the engineer lasted about 45 minutes. The interviewer had another interviewer shadow him but only the main interviewer interacted with me.

Interview Questions

Given a matrix of numbers in which some may be zero. If a cell contains a zero, set all the cells in the corresponding column and row to zero.

Answer Question

You are given a set of numbers 0 - n. Given a k, print all subsets of size k. Give the time complexity of the algorithm.

View Answers (1)

Other Details

I got the interview through an Employee Referral and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a 1:1 Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Jan 2012 (took 2 weeks)

applied online as a software engineer. got an email from a recruiter after a couple of weeks. got explanation about the process. (2 phone interviews + 4 interviews (on-site))
heard the interviews would be mostly about programming. during the interview, got asked to program some typical programming questions. even though the questions were not that hard, failed to write the code cleanly/quickly enough. got rejected just a couple of hours later.

Interview Questions

Given an unsorted array of integers, find a 3-element subset that sums to zero

View Answers (2)

Other Details

The interview consisted of a Phone Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Nov 2011 (took 2 months)

Contacted by a recruiter who asked about programming experience and why I want to work for Facebook. Then two separate technical phone interviews with software engineers followed. They introduced what they are working on in detail. They asked one or two typical coding questions, sharing them on the Collabedit.

Interview Questions

Multiply two big integers which don't fit into an built-in integer type. How would you represent big numbers as a data structure? Write the function to multiply two big integers.

Answer Question

Implement atof function. eg., +3.5e-2, .03e1, 1e1, 0.0

Answer Question

Other Details

The interview consisted of a Phone Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Negative Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Oct 2011 in Palo Alto, CA (took 2+ weeks)

First got an HR interview, asking very basic questions including some simple technical questions. Then first round asked me a coin probability problem. After that, the 2nd interviewer asked me sqrt() but I stupidly failed this problem. Great people, though interviewers are not very friendly.

Interview Questions

How to implement multiple inheritance in Java

View Answers (1)

Given set of coins and each coin has its unique probability to be head up, say double[] probs stores the probability values for all coins, print out all different cases and accordingly probability.

View Answers (2)

How to implement Sqrt(double k) efficiently?

View Answers (4)

Other Details

I got the interview through an Employee Referral and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Oct 2011 (took 4+ weeks)

First, a group of Facebook employees came to my campus to conduct on campus interview. There were 2 rounds of on campus interview - you had to pass the first round in order to get to the second. After the 2 rounds, you should be notified whether or not you receive the job. However, they asked me to complete a third and final phone interview. It took several weeks to schedule, but finally I had the phone interview.

In the first interviews, I was only asked coding questions. The third was more behavioral, but we ended with a coding question.

Interview Questions

Given a tree, print the values contained at each level on the same line.
So if you had the tree with root A, and children B and C, you would print:
A
B C

View Answers (5)

Find the min and max in an array. Now do it in less than 2n comparisons. (they were looking for the solution that finds both max and min in about 3/2 n comparisons).

View Answers (6)

Compute the square root of a number down to a certain precision.
ie sqrt(num, precision) returns a number that is in-between sqrt(num) - precision and sqrt(num) + precision.

View Answers (1)

What do you see as fb's biggest challenge in the next 5 years?

Answer Question

Other Details

The interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a 1:1 Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Received and Accepted Offer

Interviewed Oct 2011 (took 2 days)

Every single interview was exactly the same format: the interviewer gives me two or three programming problems and asked me to solve them in my language of choice in front of him on a whiteboard (or virtual whiteboard

Interview Questions

FInd the maximum sum of a sub-sequence from an positive integer array where any two numbers of sub-sequence are not adjacent to each other in the original sequence. E.g 1 2 3 4 5 6 --> 2 4 6

View Answers (6)

Other Details

The interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Jun 2011 in Palo Alto, CA (took 2 weeks)

3 rounds of phone interview for a winter internship.

Interview Questions

Given an array of integers, now we want to erase all 0's (can be other value), and we want the result array condensed, meaning no empty cell in the array.

View Answers (7)

Other Details

I got the interview through a Recruiter and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

5.0

Very Difficult Interview

Overall Negative Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Oct 2011 (took a day)

Hr contacted me and gave a timed skill test, through interviewstreet. I didn't like to code in that website nor coding a timed test. basically they don't know how long its going to take and they give very less time.They don't tell that u can pause or come again etc.. in my opinion FB is over hyped good place to work move on to other good companies ;)

Interview Questions

given a list of words with a same size and a big string that contains one of the permutation of all the words combined(say p), find the startindex of the string p in the big string

View Answers (3)

Other Details

I got the interview through a Recruiter and the interview consisted of a Skills Test.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

2.0

Easy Interview

Overall Negative Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Sep 2011 (took a day)

Facebook came to our campus and I was pre-selected for an interview for their summer internships. They told me that it was going to be a 45 minutes long interview.

The interviewer demonstrated very odd social skills, contrary to the fact that he worked for the major social networking company. Interviewer didn't even introduce himself, or look at my resume or ask how I am going. They instantly put me on the white board and asked me to write some code.

I politely asked him whether he even looked at my resume. He mentioned that he didn't look at it, and he rather want me to focus on writing code on the board. At that point, I was a bit ticked off. So, I told him that I didn't want to work for a company where people are treated as coders, and not humans. Then, I just walked out on him. The entire experience lasted for 5 minutes.

When I emailed the HR person expressing my disappointment, she defended the interviewer by saying that they were interviewing a lot of people and that's why they didn't have time to chit-chat with the interviewees.