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What do you mean by "whiteboard questions"? The ones I had at my FB interviews are questions I would describe as "any competent engineer should be able to solv
by pdpi 8y ago
What do you mean by "whiteboard questions"?
The ones I had at my FB interviews are questions I would describe as "any competent engineer should be able to solve most of these in an interview slot" sort of questions — Simple data structures (sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit as part of the problem statement), simple strategies (breadth first, depth first), and a basic understanding of time (and space!) complexity.
Of course, you can hike up the difficulty a tonne (e.g. by replacing plain binary trees with red/black trees) and progressively fewer people will be able to solve those, but in my experience that's not common in an interview environment at FB.
Ultimately, the fact that the interview process includes whiteboard questions means that people at those companies _do_ perform decently (for some definition of decently) at those problems — that's how people are selected.
- sadamznintern 8y agoThat’s because the FB process explicitly optimizes for speed. I recently finished a loop where I solved 2 problems optimally in 2 interviews and 1 in the last one and I was rejected. The speed required makes me skeptical many people can solve these problems in the required time without luck of having seen similar problems before.
- UncleMeat 8y agoDid they tell you this? I feel like a lot of candidates think they nailed it when really they missed important things. I'm not sure I've ever had a candidate solve my question fully and optimally. This of course is nowhere near necessary to get a good score but I think that thinking "yep this is as good as it gets" is a common error. The hire rate is also super low at the majors so it could have also been noise.
- sadamznintern 8y agoAre you at FB? One of them did tell me this after his round (said we got further than he thought we would), the other one explicitly said my solution was optimal and what he was looking for. The 2 questions per interview "rule" is an open secret now among people that have interviewed there. I've never heard of someone who only answered 1 per round get a follow up or an offer. *Also, they generally don't move onto a second question if they don't think the first one was good enough.