Introduction

It’s been a while since my last post. This was due to the fact I was preparing for my interview for Facebook’s 2019 Production Engineering Internship Program as well as doing some uni related work which is not really worth blogging about.

Anyway, the good news is that I got that offer from Facebook!

I decided this post to be about my overall experience so if you’re looking for technical post, come back next week.

I’ll share what, from my point of view, made me a successful candidate.

Note I will not share any of the questions I was asked due to the fact I respect the people who came up with these questions and the time they’ve spent.

First things first - get that CV right

Right, so obviously to get to the interview phase, you’ll need a rather shiny CV to impress the recruiters with.

Here you can find my CV to get some inspiration.

Now I am not by any means a CV expert or something but here are my thoughts and views on what a good CV should have.

What’s more, there are plenty of guides and tutorials on how to make a good CV so I won’t turn this post into one.

Just spend some time choosing an appropriate and good looking template and then just fill in! Something quite important I see people don’t get is the way you word your experience section - you should use active verbs like led, managed, was responsible for… - instead of passive ones.

Now you can, and probably should, have a Skills section where you list what your skills are but what I feel attracts more attention is a Personal Projects section. I can’t stress enough the importance of having projects that are not related to school or university. The more, the better but also the more completed the better - quality over quantity!

There was this youtube video that described precisely this - it went on with the story of 2 characters one of which had many many incomplete projects and couldn’t really use any of the to put in their CV as none were complete, whereas the other character didn’t have as many projects, but the few he had were all completed, well documented and tested which is the better option.

I had an issue with the aforementioned section since I have several projects I want to list but I lack space. What did I do? - I setup my own site where I could put a /projects section which could have unlimited space!

Then what’s left is to put a link to the website’s project page which turns the situation in a a win-win - I both show off my projects and also show that I’ve dedicated some time into setting up my own website. Furthermore, I feel like it is a big plus if you spend that extra time to setup a HTTPS version - just for the sake of it. You can check out how I did that here.

Step 2 - Online test

For the Production Engineering Internship I had to do an online test before getting to the one-to-one interview.

The online test was more of a sanity check on simple linux and unix commands so if you use linux on a daily basis (I mean the terminal part, not the gui stuff) and occasionally write simple bash scripts you won’t have any trouble passing this stage.

The 1-to-1 Interviews

I’ve spoken to some recruiting people at Facebook and I’ve been told that regardless of the position you apply for, surely there will a coding interview.

The Production Engineer Intern role includes two 45 minute technical interviews

The Coding Interview

Recently, I’ve focused more on the OPS-y side of things and, well you know, coding interviews at tech giants are supposed to be very hard.

The main resource I used to prepare myself for this interview was The Bible of coding interview books - Cracking the Coding Interview. I highly recommend buying (or Google-fu-ing for that matter) this book. It contains plenty of useful resources along with tips and tricks on how to prepare and ace the coding interview. I also did some preparation on Hackerrank but I felt I spent more time on fixing edge cases rather than thinking of solutions so I quit that.

The coding interview was not as hard as I expected. I reckon software engineers undergo a way more difficult one. If you are preparing for such an interview, you should refresh your data analytic skills. Normal every day stuff that Production engineers code - file operations, data parsing, some data analysis and what not.

During the interview, I find it is really important to think out loud and to say what are the tradeoffs you make when making a decision - eg. why use a set instead of a list? Oh you are doing multiple lookups, perhaps you should change the list to a dictionary? Saying these things out loud makes the interviewer aware of your knowledge on data structure operations complexity.

What’s more, do ask questions! Ask about input data size, ask about error handling, ask things you are not sure about - don’t guess!

Finally, maintaining good code quality is always important so put a comment whenever you write something not quite clear and you don’t have time to refactor but still make your interviewer aware that you know what you’ve written could be improved and ask whether you should spend time on improving it or not.

The Systems Interview

I was way more confident for the systems interview that I was for the coding one.

Now that’s a tricky one. Unless you’ve gone through some system administration courses or tinkered around with low-level kernel-y like stuff you’ll probably struggle here.

To be successful at this interview you’ll need intermidiate understanding of linux internals and the linux philosophy - all the way from booting, through process management and system calls to shells and user management. There are plenty of resources online but in my opinion what was most useful to me was my own experience - For example some while ago I set up a PXE server (I might write a post about that at some point) which thought me a lot about the boot process in linux. If you do follow my blog, I did a nice write-up on my home lab which may give you an idea of what I’ve been up to recently. All the stuff I’ve mentioned there was helpful.

Finally, having some knowledge about system calls will not hurt your chances at all - knowing the difference between fork, exec and clone family of system calls for instance. ;)

But, where is the networking part?

Well it turned out that Facebook, similarly to some other big tech companies tend to avoid asking quiestions about networking since even experienced candidates are likely to underperform on these types of questions even though I would have probably enjoyed that part.

TL;DR; tips & tricks

Know your Computer Science primitives -

Go checkout Uncle Bob’s presentaions on clean code and how to write high quality code - I strongly recommend watching these and any other of Uncle Bob’s presentations.

Something I found really useful from Cracking the Coding Interview book was this particular approach to solving difficult coding problems:

  1. Firstly, come up with a naive, even brute-force, solution.
  2. Try to improve on that - solve a couple of more complex examples by hand and you’ll notice how your brain does optimizations for you.
  3. Reverse engineer these optimizations and find out why and how your brain does them. Then turn these thoughts into code.

This strategy is described, of course way better, in the book and I highly recommend checking it out.

Regarding the systems part, the only way of learning these stuff is by doing them - pick that old PC at home your not using, setup virtualization on it, run some VMs, configure any services that come up to your mind, tinker with them thoroughly, break them, fix them - that’s how you’ll understand and learn them for good.

Doing the last one also fits quite neatly in your CV as extracurricular projects as well so it’s again a win-win.

Of course, if you are a book-lover, there are tons of great books on linux/unix system administration but that’s only half of the story - none of this knowledge matters unless you can put it in practice.

In general, if you are curious about technology and stubborn enough - you’ll succeed.

If you do have any specific questions do feel free to reach out - I’ve put enough ways you can contact me on this site already :-)