Facebook is presumably one of the best companies to work for: innovative, exciting technology every day, start-up culture where everybody works hard but happy. However, from my interview experience I can tell this company is totally overrated.
First of all, their interview questions are all made up only for interview purposes. If the job is exciting and innovative, why not share some practical problems with candidates you are dealing with? What’s worse, I got asked on exactly same questions on linear regression and lasso/ridge once in phone interview and once in onsite interview. So they basically draw questions from a pool, which is not large at all.
There is a disconnect between recruiters and interviewers. In preparation of the onsite, I asked my recruiter if the questions in onsite will be of the same nature as those in phone interviews. The guy pivoted my question and recite a bunch of prepared cliche and reassured me that all I need to do is to prepare according to the email he would send to me, which I did. But the question is, the content of the email is not consistent of what actually happened in the interview! For example, the email emphasizes CS fundamentals and Geekforgeek coding questions, which are completely different from reading a csv line by line and writing functions for data manipulation.
I also mentioned to the recruiter I don’t know much about A/B testing, which seems to be a staple for analytics data scientist. The recruiter answered I need to prepare for some basic hypothesis testing. Look, as a technical recruiter working exclusively for Facebook, he doesn’t know hypothesis testing and A/B testing are different!
The onsite interviewers also showed some questionable characteristics. For example, a project manager was clueless when i mentioned Github.
The last thing I’d like to point out is the Facebook campus, which apparently they are proud of but I think, is a bit creepy, to say the least. The Facebook campus feels like a mix of college campus and Disneyland. Bookstore, arcade, arts workshop, diner, you name it. If you don’t have much social life, you can literally live there without noticing it. Stop and think about it: is this really a nice thing? No difference between life and work? Certainly it’s a great thing for Facebook.
I’ve long heard data scientists aren’t seen as valuable as software engineers at Facebook, which is probably the reason for my encounter. But one thing for sure is, Facebook is probably not as fancy as you expect.
