How to crack Google and Facebook’s software engineering interviews

They’re equivalent to the Lamborghini amongst the sports cars, the French amongst the wine — these elite coders are found floating in the clouds of the best tech companies in the world and form a fraternity that every aspiring coder wants to be a part of. They are the software engineers of Facebook and Google. You respect them, envy them, and it would be your dream to sip coffee with them in their swanky cafeteria. While this is no [insert easy tech skill] to learn, it is not entirely impossible to crack this code if you break your fingers on it. This guide will help you secure a spot at the elite tech houses of the world.

Here’s how a typical interview process for Google/Facebook looks like:

Stage 1 (Initial technical screening)

• Introductions
• Discussion of career aspirations
• Coding
• Questions

Stage 2 (Onsite interview)

• Coding interview
• Design interview
• Behavioral interview
• Questions

The initial technical screening (phone interview)

The interview includes

• Introduction: The interviewer introduces himself and explains what he does there.
• Career aspirations: For the next couple of minutes you’re asked about your experience and aspirations.
• Coding: These 30 minutes includes coding. Typically, the interviews focus on easy algorithmic questions where you are asked to write code on a shared code editor like CoderPad or Collabedit.
• The last couple of minutes is for you to ask questions and to get an insider’s perspective.

Tips to prepare for the interview

• Invest time to brush up your interview skills, coding abilities, and algorithms.
• Practice the frequently asked coding questions from resources such as InterviewBit, Topcoder, Careercup,  SPOJ, Codeforces, Facebook Code Lab, and GeeksforGeeks.
• Since these interviews have a time constraint, practice your time management.
• Review data structures like lists, arrays, hash tables, and maps, graphs, searches, and traversals. Also review recursions, algorithms, iterative approaches, and complexity.
• Think about your interests, strengths as an engineer and two to five year career aspirations.
• Books such as Cracking the Coding Interview, Introduction to Algorithms, and Algorithms in C are must-read resources.

Onsite interview

This includes having to appear for four to five interviews in a day. There are three types:

Coding interview

Harder than the on-call interview, the questions in this interview require exact evaluation. This interview typically lasts 45 minutes including introductions, coding, and questions.