<story><title>My worst tech interview experience</title><url>https://www.jessesquires.com/blog/2021/12/01/my-worst-tech-interview-experience/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cowmoo728</author><text>My impression of the facebook interview experience was that it is specifically selecting people that were calm under pressure and well rehearsed. They are testing for people that put in the effort to crank out a bunch of algorithms practice because they want to ace an interview. FB and Amazon were also explicit that they were looking for people with a particular &amp;quot;get things done and promote myself&amp;quot; attitude. Whether or not those people make good employees, I don&amp;#x27;t know.&lt;p&gt;When I interviewed at FB, every round was something that I had drilled on leetcode or similar sites. Yes, the wording was changed and the problems were altered a bit, but they were the same algorithms. And there were also two &amp;quot;lightning&amp;quot; rounds of 15 minutes each to solve two simpler algorithms problems (maybe easy&amp;#x2F;medium difficulty on leetcode). This experience gave me the impression that facebook&amp;#x27;s goals in hiring were to select people who really wanted the job and could pass quizzes well.</text></item><item><author>avl999</author><text>I generally don&amp;#x27;t mind whiteboard programming interviews but even so asking someone to implement merge sort is a bad question.&lt;p&gt;My sanity check for any question I ask is- Is the question I&amp;#x27;m asking something that someone in the past published a paper about? If so then that&amp;#x27;s probably not a good fit for a 45 minute whiteboarding interview. This question falls in that category. Generally those algorithms are complex enough that it is unrealistic to expect someone to get them right from first principles so at that point you are just selecting for people who just happened to have dealt with them, memorized them or implemented them recently.&lt;p&gt;I have a co-worker who used to ask people to past to parse and evaluate infix notation expressions in interviews (and there are companies that ask that question). Always stuck me as weird as multiple papers have been written about that problem, are you really expecting someone to implement a solution to a problem that people spend weeks (months?) thinking about before publishing? Could even Djikstra have come up with the Shunting Yard Algorithm in a 45 minute interview (with implementation on whiteboard) if that was his first exposure to the problem of expression parsing?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lhorie</author><text>One bit of dirty laundry to keep in mind with FAANG and friends is that the interview process is somewhat self-selecting. Often times, the very people that crammed leetcode in the hopes of landing FAANG roles are the ones interviewing candidates three months later. So there this sort of twisted feedback cycle where the interviewers think that leetcode solving ability is a sort of badge of honor or whatever.&lt;p&gt;Obviously not all interviewers are like that, and at more senior levels, interviewers do place more emphasis on other criteria, but for entry&amp;#x2F;L4&amp;#x2F;L5-ish roles, it&amp;#x27;s a pretty rampant thing.</text></comment>
<story><title>My worst tech interview experience</title><url>https://www.jessesquires.com/blog/2021/12/01/my-worst-tech-interview-experience/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cowmoo728</author><text>My impression of the facebook interview experience was that it is specifically selecting people that were calm under pressure and well rehearsed. They are testing for people that put in the effort to crank out a bunch of algorithms practice because they want to ace an interview. FB and Amazon were also explicit that they were looking for people with a particular &amp;quot;get things done and promote myself&amp;quot; attitude. Whether or not those people make good employees, I don&amp;#x27;t know.&lt;p&gt;When I interviewed at FB, every round was something that I had drilled on leetcode or similar sites. Yes, the wording was changed and the problems were altered a bit, but they were the same algorithms. And there were also two &amp;quot;lightning&amp;quot; rounds of 15 minutes each to solve two simpler algorithms problems (maybe easy&amp;#x2F;medium difficulty on leetcode). This experience gave me the impression that facebook&amp;#x27;s goals in hiring were to select people who really wanted the job and could pass quizzes well.</text></item><item><author>avl999</author><text>I generally don&amp;#x27;t mind whiteboard programming interviews but even so asking someone to implement merge sort is a bad question.&lt;p&gt;My sanity check for any question I ask is- Is the question I&amp;#x27;m asking something that someone in the past published a paper about? If so then that&amp;#x27;s probably not a good fit for a 45 minute whiteboarding interview. This question falls in that category. Generally those algorithms are complex enough that it is unrealistic to expect someone to get them right from first principles so at that point you are just selecting for people who just happened to have dealt with them, memorized them or implemented them recently.&lt;p&gt;I have a co-worker who used to ask people to past to parse and evaluate infix notation expressions in interviews (and there are companies that ask that question). Always stuck me as weird as multiple papers have been written about that problem, are you really expecting someone to implement a solution to a problem that people spend weeks (months?) thinking about before publishing? Could even Djikstra have come up with the Shunting Yard Algorithm in a 45 minute interview (with implementation on whiteboard) if that was his first exposure to the problem of expression parsing?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>whatshisface</author><text>I got asked to parse infix notation and figured it out in the 45 minutes despite having no prior experience with parsing anything more complicated than CSV. I am not bragging or anything, I just know these discussions are biased towards kvetching so someone has to weigh in for it being possible to accomplish. My field is not computer science and if anything I&amp;#x27;m the perfect example of who the infix notation question should be biased against.&lt;p&gt;To be fair the interviewer described my performance as &amp;quot;muscling through it&amp;quot; (exact phrasing changed to protect the innocent) so take it as you will. :)&lt;p&gt;I am aware that there is no way to write this comment without sounding like a boast, but that&amp;#x27;s just more reason to write it because there are probably a large number of people with the same story who can&amp;#x27;t balance out the discussion by telling it.</text></comment>