Have you ever dreamt of working for Facebook? Have you got the potential that is required to crack the tough interview questions that are asked?
Imagine you are in a board room and your job is at stake and you are asked some weirdest and witty questions what will you feel like? Facebook recruits a varied number of employees and questions do differ for every role. But one thing that stays common is the objective of the organization to recruit people who are unique and dedicated as the company’s features.
In this ‘make or break’ situation we bring to you some of the questions that are asked during Facebook interviews. Hold your breath and keep calm and see whether you know how to solve them.
1. Data Scientist Candidate
There is a building with 100 floors. You are given 2 identical eggs. How do you use 2 eggs to find the threshold floor, where the egg will definitely break from any floor above floor N, including floor N itself?
Well, this can be solved by using the Binary Search Method! We start by dropping one of the eggs on the 10th floor: if it doesn’t break then we continue on to the 20th floor, then 30th, 40th… up to 100 in intervals of 10 until the first egg actually, breaks. If the egg breaks on the 10th floor then we know that the threshold floor must be either the 10th floor or one of the floors below it – the egg will definitely break on any floor above the 10th floor, so we can eliminate all of the floors above the 10th. The formula to be used is m∗(m+1)/2=n.
2. Protect Designer Candidate
If you were going to redesign an ATM machine, how would you do it?
The answer depends on the person asked but the questions that are to be clarified remains common for all. Like what kind of ATM actually you aim to redesign? The indoor ones in banks, the wall mounted ones in the bank or the third party ones in stores that don’t accept cards. Remember Facebook always looks for the betterment of their users so while you answer you should actually look at the region the problem is faced. And specify beforehand which problem actually you are looking onto – the physique of the machine or the internal cash storage part.
3. Data Scientist Candidate
How many birthday posts occur on Facebook on a given day?
Assuming even distribution in birthdays, every day 4 million people on Facebook have birthdays. Suppose a person has 600 people on the friend list. Assuming 10 % of his friends post birthday greetings on his timeline, he will get 60 wall post greetings. So one can expect 240 million birthday greetings each day.
4. Data Scientist Candidate
You’re at a casino with two dice, if you roll a 5 you win, and get paid $10. What is your expected payout? If you play until you win (however long that takes) then stop, what is your expected payout?
This question is solved by the probability of success. N(Success scenarios) = N(1+4,2+3,3+2,4+1) = 4
N(Total) = 6*6 = 36
P(Success) = p = N(Success scenarios)/N(Total) = 4/36 = 1/9
Number of trials until win = 1/p = 1/(1/9) = 9
Payout = N(losses)*($-5) + N(wins)*($10) = 8*($-5) + 1*($10) = $-30
5. Content Producer Candidate
How would you set up an interview in this room?
Keeping in mind what actually Facebook does to make the users comfortable so an interview room should be set up making the person coming in comfortable and flexible. Also, all the requirements should be set up according to the need of the job.
6. Data Scientist Candidate
How many Big Macs does McDonald sell each year in the US?
Individual products are not tracked on a national (or international) level, so they can’t publish them. Some things can be extrapolated for use projections by multiplying the sales of the company stores product mix, other things can be determined approximately by a number of tons of potatoes sold by approved suppliers, or quantity of meat patties, nuggets, etc. sold.
7. Product Manager Candidate
How would you build Facebook for blind people?
In 2016 Facebook has already come up with Artificial Intelligence. This is due to a development called Facebook’s object recognition technology. In an IOS device while one swipes through the posts they can hear the posts. This is called Automatic Alt Text
8. Internet Marketing Analyst candidate
A Russian gangster kidnaps you. He puts two bullets in consecutive order in an empty six-round revolver, spins it, points it at your head and shoots. *click* You’re still alive. He then asks you, do you want me to spin it again and fire or pull the trigger again. For each option, what is the probability that you’ll be shot?
Again a question of probability. You should look into the eyes of the gangster and say him “Pull The Trigger!”. You can call me mad for saying this but not the math that proves this. Since the revolver moves in a deterministic fashion, death can only occur if the first shot was fired from chamber 4, leading to the second shot being fired from chamber 5 (bullet). If the first shot was fired from either chambers 1, 2, or 3, then the subsequent shot would be blanked from 2, 3, or 4! To complete the calculation, the probability of dying here is 1 (the number of given outcomes) divided by 4 (number of total outcomes) or 25%.
9. Product Analytics candidate
Given access to all the data Facebook collects, what would you do with it?
Think and answer in your way. Let’s see how creative you are!
10. Software Engineer candidate
You are trying to rob houses on a street. Each house has some amount of cash. Your goal is to rob houses such that you maximize the total robbed amount. The constraint is once you rob a house you cannot rob a house adjacent to that house.
This is a programming question. You need to keep track of houses that are marked robbed. You can do some sort of recursion and at every step evaluate a sequence of 3 houses. At each step either you can add the middle house or the two adjacent houses to rob list (provided they are ok to rob.) Do the program for yourself! You just have to count the houses and return back to the main function after checking in a loop.
Enough of a whacking experience till now and you must have understood that the questions though look tough but can be done in a jiffy if you are smart enough to answer!
