I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Meta (Seattle, WA) in Nov 2020
Interview
Attended a virtual university event and submitted my CV through the link that was shared after the event. The recruiter reached out a few days later to schedule a phone screening in which she asked some general product sense and SQL questions. The recruiter even took time after the phone interview to give me tips on my next interview (there are 3 in total for the internship); overall the recruiter was outstanding and went above and beyond, which seems to be true for all Facebook recruiters.
Saying this, the actual Facebook DS interviewer was OK. Take this with a grain of salt since I didn't pass, but the interview started with "I've been chilling all day so I didn't get the chance to see your CV." At first, I thought this was a "cool casual" way of warming up the conversation but I was wrong. My favorite part was when the interviewer got annoyed during the SQL portion, “why are you still looking at it, it’s right.”
My least favorite part was that the interviewer was strangely antagonistic towards Facebook products. I know that Facebook is going through an internal identity crisis – but I personally believe that Facebook has had a net positive impact in the world and that many of the accusations it receives are not actually supported by data (e.g multiple peer-reviewed papers on fake news/CA found zero evidence of any impact on elections). And while the interviewer can obviously disagree with this notion, never did I think that I would face such clear opposition to it with a proud declaration that she "did not care about the Facebook consumer products at all." Perhaps one should not be interviewing interns for a company that they disagree so deeply with.
There are interviewers who want you to succeed — and then there are interviewers who act like that indignant college tour-guide student-volunteer who doesn’t actually like the college they go to nor the job they volunteered for so they’re passive-aggressive throughout the entire tour. Mine was definitely the latter, I hope you get the former.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
- Operator that combines and returns the result-set (rows) retrieved by two or more select statements?
- How would you determine the customer service quality of Facebook Marketplace B2B2C through the chatbox?
- Some basic AVG() SQL question
- Learn how to use SQL CTE for basic aggregate functions
I applied in September. After two weeks, I got email with additional questions like 'Why are you good candidate for this role?'. Two more weeks later, I had first interview over the phone and two online interviews following that week.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
There were mostly questions concerning SQL and product sense: some easy technical questions like 'What commend would you use to sort results in descending order?' and 'What types of joins are there?', as well as two not difficult coding problems where I had to join tables, filter out some rows, group filtered ones and order results; when it comes to product sense, that part was quite difficult: they asked what metrics would you use to find out if two users are friends in real life and how would you find out if some user has more real-life friends than not-real-life among his friends on facebook.
I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Meta in Sep 2020
Interview
A quick pre-screening interview that involved general concept questions on SQL and coding. No long explanations required, they just expect a two to three word answer. I expected a normal interview (e.g. Starting with introducing myself, etc.) but apparatently this is just pre-screening and they jumpted right into the questions part.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I had questions like what's the default sorting order in SQL, how do you join two tables wuth only common rows selected, etc.