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> I don't think that is a well supported inference from the post in question. From the post in question: > [screening portion] The bulk of the time is spent o

> I don't think that is a well supported inference from the post in question. From the post in question: > [screening portion] The bulk of the time is spent on coding exercises. The interviewer will send you a link to a collaborative editor and ask you to solve some programming problems. > We will ask you to do a lot of coding during the interview process, because programming ability tends to correlate strongly with how well people perform as employees. We even have a large set of take-home questions. It can't hurt to check them out and maybe solve a couple before you even submit your resume. > Take your time preparing. Do code katas and practice interviewing with friends. Try solving the interview questions on our site. > Hard training makes for an easy battle. Brush up on techniques that you may not use every day, but are very useful when you need them: recursion, graph theory, tree traversal, combinatorial problems, etc. > You might be asked to implement some well-known library functions. Being asked to implement some well-known library functions is why I said re-re-re-implement merge-bubble sort-reduce. The rest is why I said FB seems more interested in this than anything else on the list. Code katas? Take-home questions? Maybe it isn't this way in practice, but the post certainly makes it sound like a bizarro SAT. Needing to "prep" and "practice" coding questions in the way encouraged seems rather odd to me.

aristus 14y ago
Hi, author here -- the article focuses on "code prep" because that's something you can brush up in a short-ish period of time. You can't become a nicer or more thoughtful person quickly, so on those parts of our criteria we take people as they are. Implementing some well-known library functions is basically a quick way to see whether you know how they work. If you don't feel it's necessary to ever practice for an interview, well, ok. This advice is not for you.
- LockeWatts 14y ago
  Have you stopped to consider that given the pressure situation of an interview at a well respected company, and without the common resources a programmer generally works with (an IDE and reference documentation), that a person might have trouble with this despite understanding how it works? It seems like you should be asking 'Write me something to do X, using Y from the standard library' and evaluating that code, if you're looking to evaluate how well someone knows a library function.
  - aristus 14y ago
    "Knowing the argument signature" and "knowing how to implement the guts" are two very different things. I personally don't care if you can remember fine details of the API. We ask many kinds of questions; in the article these are only examples.
- nilkn 14y ago
  > If you don't feel it's necessary to ever practice for an interview, well, ok. This advice is not for you. I don't think that was his point at all, with all due respect. I got the impression he was just criticizing the rather stereotypical technical interview, which Facebook seems to subscribe to very strongly based on the article.
- bshastry 14y ago
  > If you don't feel it's necessary to ever practice for an interview, well, ok. This advice is not for you. It is wrong to conclude that the person whose comment you replied to, feels that way. Excerpt: "Needing to "prep" and "practice" coding questions in the way encouraged seems rather odd to me." [emphasis added]
- xiaoma 14y ago
  >You can't become a nicer or more thoughtful person quickly Why not?
- bulatb 14y ago
  If people who already work in software feel the need to study for an interview, it's a pretty decent indication that the interview itself is... not ideal.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    Please share what is the ideal interview.
    - Nimi 14y ago
      Not necessarily "ideal" IMO, but a friend told me about an interview where they told him beforehand "bring your own laptop, set up", then when he arrived they told him "please build this" (I think it was something similar to Everything). After a couple of hours when he was done, they asked him to add some functionality (network support? can't recall). At least this type of interview seems to solve the problem of developers strangely needing to study for an interview, and I would guess it also better represents coding ability. Alternate versions can include "debug this" and "design this" (which is pretty popular AFAIK).

aristus 14y ago

Hi, author here -- the article focuses on "code prep" because that's something you can brush up in a short-ish period of time. You can't become a nicer or more thoughtful person quickly, so on those parts of our criteria we take people as they are. Implementing some well-known library functions is basically a quick way to see whether you know how they work. If you don't feel it's necessary to ever practice for an interview, well, ok. This advice is not for you.

LockeWatts 14y ago
Have you stopped to consider that given the pressure situation of an interview at a well respected company, and without the common resources a programmer generally works with (an IDE and reference documentation), that a person might have trouble with this despite understanding how it works? It seems like you should be asking 'Write me something to do X, using Y from the standard library' and evaluating that code, if you're looking to evaluate how well someone knows a library function.
- aristus 14y ago
  "Knowing the argument signature" and "knowing how to implement the guts" are two very different things. I personally don't care if you can remember fine details of the API. We ask many kinds of questions; in the article these are only examples.
nilkn 14y ago
> If you don't feel it's necessary to ever practice for an interview, well, ok. This advice is not for you. I don't think that was his point at all, with all due respect. I got the impression he was just criticizing the rather stereotypical technical interview, which Facebook seems to subscribe to very strongly based on the article.
bshastry 14y ago
> If you don't feel it's necessary to ever practice for an interview, well, ok. This advice is not for you. It is wrong to conclude that the person whose comment you replied to, feels that way. Excerpt: "Needing to "prep" and "practice" coding questions in the way encouraged seems rather odd to me." [emphasis added]
xiaoma 14y ago
>You can't become a nicer or more thoughtful person quickly Why not?
bulatb 14y ago
If people who already work in software feel the need to study for an interview, it's a pretty decent indication that the interview itself is... not ideal.
- Evbn 14y ago
  Please share what is the ideal interview.
  - Nimi 14y ago
    Not necessarily "ideal" IMO, but a friend told me about an interview where they told him beforehand "bring your own laptop, set up", then when he arrived they told him "please build this" (I think it was something similar to Everything). After a couple of hours when he was done, they asked him to add some functionality (network support? can't recall). At least this type of interview seems to solve the problem of developers strangely needing to study for an interview, and I would guess it also better represents coding ability. Alternate versions can include "debug this" and "design this" (which is pretty popular AFAIK).