Facebook Software Engineering New Grad Interview Questions &amp; Reviews

Other Details

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

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Nov 2011 in Palo Alto, CA (took 4 weeks)

A friend who's an engineer there passed my resume along. Had two phone interviews which I found quite difficult. They both had me code in collabedit.org, and the second also actually ran my code on codepad.org - that was a surprise! I did not do perfectly on the phone interview questions, but still got through.

They brought me on-site for an interview day which included a tour, lunch, a talk, and four 1:1 interviews. One-half of the first interview included some questions about leadership, teamwork etc., and the rest were all technical. One of the interviewers seemed to be in a grumpy mood, but that's the luck of the draw. The whiteboard coding questions were not too bad and I think I got them all, though with some silly mistakes along the way. I'd agree with the previous reviewer who said their questions are not as difficult as Google's- though perhaps they therefore have higher expectations as to how quickly/flawlessly you solve them.

On my way out they gave me a goodie bag with some swag. Oh, and at one point I saw Zuckerberg milling about. Got an email a week or so later- I would not be winning the Facebook IPO lottery!

Interview Questions

Write a class providing an LRU cache

3SUM problem

Open-ended systems/design question on storing and searching zillions of status updates

Other Details

I got the interview through a College or University.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

View Comments (1)

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Oct 2011 in Palo Alto, CA (took a day)

Facebook came to our career fair and I applied online. I received an on campus interview. Their fulltime interview process for new grads works like the following:

1 on 1 interview with a Facebook Engineer (1st day)
1 on 1 interview with a Facebook Engineer (2nd day, if you did well enough the first day)

On site interview at Facebook HQ

Their interviews are almost completely technical.

Interview Questions

Find a needle in the haystack: given two c-strings (null terminated), return a pointer to the location of where the needle occurs in the haystack, NULL otherwise.

Given a binary tree print the first level, followed by a newline, the second level, followed by a newline, etc.

Other Details

I got the interview through a College or University and 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 Sep 2011 in Palo Alto, CA (took 3 weeks)

I've applied from facebook.com/careers and 3 weeks later a recruiter sent an email that they were interested in to make an interview. They were very kind and interested. I got a detailed instruction about the process. Also they gave me some blog posts or other links that I've already found at my company research. They said that the phone interview worth to prepare and I may take time to study. I wanted 2 weeks to get ready and they accepted that. Than, someone else (another recruiter) got in touch to create the schedule of phone interview. After creating appointment, before that 2 weeks, they called me to just talk. It took about 5 mins. I asked some questions about the company and recruitment process.

After two weeks I got a call and that was an engineer. He asked me some questions about my background. After answers, I've signed in to an online editor to write some code in shared session. They asked two algorithm questions and I thought I was not so bad. After these questions, he asked to me that do I have any question about company or technology. I've asked something to just ask. He answered them very kindly and detailed. After 45 mins at talk, he said that's time to go.

About 5 hours later, I got an email from the first recruiter that I'm not suitable. Also the recruiter has added as a contact on linkedin. That was completely sign of they are nice and they want über people.

Interview Questions

Implement division without using multiplication or division. It should work most efficient and fast.

View Answers (8)

Implement a suggestion function that generates alternative strings for given password strings like "facebook" => "F@ceß00k" and "fæc€Bo0K" or sth.

Other Details

I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a Skills Test.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Feb 2011 (took 2 months)

I applied through my school's career services and was contacted by a recruiter a few weeks later. She set up a phone interview that she did herself. It was a technical interview, asking questions about data structures, algorithms, and runtime analysis. It wasn't hard. The questions were mostly about trees, hash tables, and a couple sort algorithms. She was nice at first when she asked me about my experience in the field (school projects and internship experiences) but she caught me off guard when asking the technical questions and I asked for a minute to think about the answer. Even though she said yes, a moment later she'd say "Would you like me to move on to the next question?" as if I didn't know the answer, but I did. So I'd try to explain to her what I thought at that moment and if I missed anything in my explanation, even the smallest thing, she'd cut me off to point that out and moved on to the next question. Fortunately, I did quite well. By the end of the week she emailed me that I'm through to the next round and that another recruiter would contact me with the details.

After a few weeks, I didn't hear back from them so I emailed her. Apparently she had been snatched up from Facebook to a new startup company and left her files to other recruiters who didn't have time to go through all. It took me about a month (through the help of friends who also interviewed with Facebook and school's career services) to finally get ahold of a Facebook recruiter. She apologized and set me up with another interview right away. A software engineer called me a few days later and we used a website that let me code and he'd be able to see it. The second interview was just one coding problem (make sure you're fast and code bug-free programs!) and then we spent about 15-20 minutes talking about Facebook itself. I thought I did well and hit it off with the interviewer. But a few days later I got an email saying that I'm not through.

Interview Questions

Explain in detail what a hash table is, how would you implement it, what would be a good hash function, and when is it good to use a hash table.

Print out the level order traversal on a binary tree.

Other Details

I got the interview through a College or University and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a Skills Test.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Mar 2010 (took 2 weeks)

Was contacted by a recruiter after submitting my resume. Set up a time to talk. Asked a few Algo, Data Structure and C++ questions. Was contacted again regarding a phone technical interview. Had a 45 mins interview where I was asked to code in collabedit.

Interview Questions

Implement strstr

Other Details

The interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a Skills Test and a Background Check.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Oct 2007 in Palo Alto, CA (took a day)

I had one on campus interview, a follow up phone interview and then an on-site interview at their HQ in downtown Palo Alto. HR did a fantastic job with coordinating the interview day but the engineers that interviewed me were on their cell phones and did not seem interested in conducting a comprehensive interview. Every interviewer started off with "Why Facebook?" and asked an algorithm and design question. I realized later that almost all the programming questions I was asked were pulled DIRECTLY from "Programming Interviews Exposed". From the book:

The design questions were centered around processing large amounts of data, caching, time complexity, etc.

Interview Questions

Given a set of characters, print out all possible permutations.

Given a binary tree, print out the elements in order. Without recursion.

Find the first letter in a string that does not have a pair.