A guide to crack Google and Facebook's software engineering interviews

This guide will help you secure a spot at the elite tech houses, says Tech in Asia

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. 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)

Stage 2 (Onsite interview)

The initial technical screening (phone interview)

• 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.

Onsite interview

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

Design interview

This interview is to assess your ability to solve non-trivial designing and engineering problems. The interviewer starts with a broad design problem that you solve verbally and on a drawing board.

The two types of design interviews are:

Systems design

Product design

Behavioral interview

This is partly behavioral and partly coding.

This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here.