My interview tips and experience

Coop program in SFU is organizing an technical interview panel and I was invited to join the panel, based on my interview experience with Microsoft, Google, Facebook, IBM Extreme Blue. I think it would be nice to share some of my tips and experience here in my blog too.

General Tips:

* The types of questions you will get depend more on what position you applied.
* Research about the company and their interviews online ahead of time
* Prepare for the behavioral questions. Career service in SFU provides mock-up practice, which I found very useful. You can contact them to make an appointment. They have very good resources too. http://www.sfu.ca/career/students/findajob.html
* To prepare for the technical questions

o review the data structure and algorithm concepts. I recommend one very useful book, "Programming Interviews Exposed", which summarizes a few main data structures and its associated technical questions, and includes tips for technical interviews as well.
o practice some coding questions in real time
o practice you ability to describe a approach to solve problem orally.
o practice solving problem or writing code in white board, because it is very different from coding on computer

My Facebook interview experience:

I submit my resume in a conference, Grace Hopper Celebration. That is how I got the interview opportunity. After that, their HR contacted me through email, where I found out that I need to go to their website and solve a programming puzzle before receiving a phone interview. So I spent two days on the programming puzzle and finally got a phone interview opportunity. First, I was scheduled a phone meeting with the HR recuiter. I thought it was going to be very informal chat, but it turned out very much like an interview. She asked me a serious of behavioral questions along with also some programming language questions, like "what is the 'static' in C++?", "what is v-table" and etc. After that, I was scheduled a technical interview with one of their engineers. Then that technical interview was very standard, mainly one programing question. I thought I did good, but apparently not good enough to reach their standard. So I didn't get into last round of the interview, which is the site interview.

A few things I would like to bring up specifically about facebook:
- I found facebook interview process is not very well standardized, compared to other big companies.
- The facebook puzzles are very hard, at least I found so. I picked a relatively easy one, but was still struggling for a long time. However, they are very good questions for improving your puzzle solving and coding skills, so I definitely recommend to practice on them. http://www.facebook.com/careers/puzzles.php.
- Facebook has not very strong connection with SFU. Few of their employees are from SFU.