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
2 technical calls - first one was SQL + Case Study on metrics, second one was similar case study and a quantitative stats type questions. Got the offer ~ 10 days after, full process took 2 months or so
resume -> product case -> 2 SQL
Product case ask about the market place. "Based on the conversation between custumer and seller, how to determine whether the custumer's issue has been solved or not"
SQL is easy.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Product case ask about the market place. "Based on the conversation between costumer and seller, how to determine whether the costumer's issue has been solved or not"
There were two interviews, both were 45 minutes long. First focused on SQL and a product case portion. Second focused on SQL and "quant" (basically familiarity with numbers and statistics)
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What metrics would you track if Facebook were to launch Facebook Dating (before they actually launched)