J'ai postulé via un recruteur. Le processus a pris 4 semaines. J'ai passé un entretien chez Meta (Londres, Angleterre) en oct. 2019
Entretien
A phone screening call with another EM and then a full day of interviews covering behavioural, past projects, code and system design.
Although the coding part can be scary for someone that has been a manager before and not typically coding anymore, I believe the standard is reasonable and this shouldn't be the scary part of the interview. It's recommended only 5-10% of the preparation time is spent here.
System design interviews are fun although an academic exercise.
My experience wasn't great on the rest of interviews (behavioural, projects retrospective). It just feels like you're being grilled on questions on your past experience. No focus on how you think or how you can potentially operate, just question on what happened on a different organisation that is not Facebook. It's hard to see how many ways of operating in other companies can apply on a place like FB as they work in a different way.
The breaks between interviews were with another person you can ask questions, but answers were vague.
Nobody could really explain what an EM does and how and EM operates day to day. Even if you ask the answers are vague.
Initial telephone call with a recruiter, followed by 2 zoom interview (system design + behavioral), followed with 5 zoom interviews (system design, behavioral and AI-coding-assistance). Process and recruiter were very transparent, supportive and well structured.
Questions d'entretien [1]
Question 1
System design question + to tell and explain situations from previous experience
J'ai postulé en ligne. Le processus a pris 2 mois. J'ai passé un entretien chez Meta
Entretien
Standard 2 interview screening + 5 interview if you pass the screening. You can prepare for the interview by looking up resources online - Meta has a fairly consistent process.
The only reason for me writing this report is that despite the recruiters' professionalism throughout, it was quite galling that after a long process and even after "passing" the hiring bar, I was told they were going to pause the role (though my 'pass' is good for 12 months). I'll post an update if I have one.
Do not trust the recruiter ...
TL;DR ...
The screening interview was swift. The recruiter was 15 minutes late and asked only one question to validate that I had one of the expected experience. There was no qualification of how much I knew about it. The first loop consisted in a behavioral interview with the hiring manager as well as a system design interview. The recruiter communicated the topic that will be analyzed in the design interview - a highly technical topic - as well as the name of the interviewers. I studying intensely to be prepared. I validated that the name of the interviewers three days before the interview. The recruiter confirmed them. Nevertheless, the design interview was on a different topic, not relevant to the field I was applying for. This is nonchalant from the recruiter. As a takeaway for other candidate as engineering managers, out of caution, I would suggest to prepare not only on your subject matter, but also on "generic" system design. Do not trust what the recruiter says. It would be better they say nothing rather than guide in the wrong direction.
Questions d'entretien [1]
Question 1
A design question for a hardware-software system. The interviewer kept it generic, which added to the difficulty of the interview. I had to (1) switch from an end-to-end system design (EM level) to a low-level system design, (2) account for the super generic question while giving enough technical trade-offs, (3) not lose time time building a make-believe scenario as the interviewer was not looking for spec collection but rather a generic deep-dive.
