YOE: exactly 5
Position: Fullstack C# developer @ Hedge Fund
Location: London
Background
Applied to both E4 and E5 SWE, Product position online in August. Recruiter approached me with the E5 one. First interview in 5 years since graduation. Took phone interview in Sept and Recruiter came back in two days.
Scheduled the virtual onsite interview in Dec because I need more time to prepare (Working 70+ hours per week). At the end recommended for E4 and putting on hold til next year.
Updates
Received the final offer now in March 2021.
https://leetcode.com/discuss/compensation/1127416/Facebook-or-E4-or-London-or-Still-negotiating
Phone interview
One Easy and one Hard. Both can be found on https://leetcode.com/company/facebook/
Virtual onsite interview
Round 1: Two Medium. Both are top listed Facebook tagged LC questions. One of them is a variant version.
Being asked to come up with test cases.
Round 2: Two Medium. Top listed again. Being asked to come up with test cases again.
Also follow up questions on trade offs eg modify input / working on copy
Round 3: Typical Behavioral questions. Got weak signal here. Feedback saying my thought process was not presented clearly but my decisions were right.
Round 4: I had product design interview instead of system design interview. It focused on API design.
Result:
Recruiter said positive feedbacks at the beginning before the Debrief.
After the Debrief the conclusion was that there are weak signals from Behavioral interview. A borderline E5, not recommended for CR.
Recruiter fought for me and pushed my packet to CR. CR recommended a E4 offer saying borderline E5 but very strong E4. But due to hiring freeze it has been put on hold until January next year.
Overall I have solved ~110 LC questions. Easy: 19 Medium: 62 Hard:30.
For product design interview, all the source about system design are not very useful. As they are not focusing on API design. I think what really helped is reading API design doc from FAANG companys eg https://cloud.google.com/apis/design/ Still recommend to study system design to some extent because the api design need to be coherent with the server side architecture in your mind.
For behavioral interview I recommend following STAR approach (which I did not and have costed me a E5 offer I think). If your answer do not align to what interviewer is expecting and he/she doesnt follow up, they move on and you are screwed. You might not get a follow up behavioral interview and get rejected.
So better use STAR approach to present your thought process, how did I come up with the action and the result / my impact clearly in one go in order to have a strong signal. I kind of failed this one and get downgraded.
