Sunday, September 1, 2019

Case study: Trip to Facebook onsite coding interview

Sept. 1, 2019

Introduction


It takes a lot of practice to be good at interview as an interviewer, I have practiced over 150 times as an interviewer starting Jan. 2018. But as an interviewee, I have a long road to train myself and work on improvements. I like to write a case study on Facebook onsite coding interview.

How to get rid of anxiety?


2:00 PM - 4:30 PM flight from Vancouver to San Francisco
rental a car, go to meeting place - Sichun restaurant, San Mateo

6:30 PM - 9:00 PM
I booked the meeting Sunday and met all my friends working in Silicon Valley area. They are very experienced managers. One of them coached me how to do product design for Facebook onsite. She told me that she applied so many jobs in Hong Kong, and she likes to write top down or bottom up, draw a lot of diagrams.

9:30 PM - 11:00 PM
Swimming and thinking about how to prepare for interviews.

I came out ideas to write down outline of system design:
  1. Functional requirement
  2. Non functional requirement
  3. Requirement not specified

...

I exhausted myself and went to sleep.

Overall, get connected to friends, and learn things important in industry, and get some coaching from friends.


Understand what I can control


I decided to spend two hours in gym and did some work out. And then spent one hour to write a post on Leetcode.com for an algorithm. Here is the blog, and here is discussion post.

I gave up ideas to review 170 algorithms and tried to memorize all kinds of ideas to solve those algorithms.

I understood that it is time for me to be tested how good I did my practice last two years.

Understand the challenging position


On August 19, I walked 200 meters to my friend and project manager Dr. Jin. We talked about work and life in Silicon Valley one hour. I understood that it is so challenging for me to compete a position from Facebook.

I understood that I am a underdog as an interviewee. But I like to learn something from my friend since she works as a project manager last 10 years and she just started a new job as a project manager as well.

Education is so important for both of us. She worked on Ph.D. and she got in less than five years. I did try to get it, but I did not make it happen from 2001 to 2010.

Three hours to study


I spent three hours to study from 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM on April 19, 2019. I decided to go out to visit Stanford university campus and enjoyed my trip of California.

Those three algorithms I reviewed another tree algorithm called serialization of tree, copy of tree.



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