I applied online, and got contacted by the recruiter after 2 months...
Start with something good. The recruiting team did a great job arranging everything smoothly and promptly, especially when they know I've already got other offers with approaching deadlines, they significantly expedited the process. From my first call with a recruiter, to a technical phone interview, and to the point when hotels and flights are booked for the onsite, it took only two days. I've been contacting with multiple recruiters, and every one of them are quite professional.
Then the very bad. I've been interviewing at lots of companies over the years, and myself have interviewed lots of candidates at my previous jobs, this one is so far my worst interview experience. Out of the 6 interviewers:
- At 10:30am in the morning, one interviewer yawns all the time when we are talking face to face and not even tried to hide it. Many times I was not sure whether I should stop the discussion to let me finish. It gave me the feeling that people here don't even care about what other people think. So unprofessional.
- Another interview is about an open-ended data analysis problem. When we are done and the interviewer let me ask him questions, I ask him how he would approach the problem he asked me, and received an abrupt and arrogant reply 'I rather you ask other questions'. That moment feels so weired.
- It was arranged that 3 of the interviews are technical and 3 are behavioral, but it turns out that 5 of the 6 are technical. Interviewers were told what topics they should be focusing on. I know it's a tech company, but the fact that there are interviewers who are told to focus on behavioral choose to go technical gives me the feeling that people here just don't care about behaviors at all.
I used to have high hope for Facebook. I always think Facebook is a great company and has done some amazing things. I still think so. I was told by the recruiter that employees at Facebook need to go through extensive training so they are eligible to conduct interviews. But at the time when I walked out of the door, I made up my mind that even they extend an offer, I will decline.
Also, as many people already mentioned on Glassdoor, most data scientist positions, including the one I interviewed, at Facebook are really data analysts. I've double confirmed this by asking many interviewer projects they are working on. It seems that using t-test to compare the results of different experiment is something the infrastructure team does most of their time. Another example is that, during my technical phone interview, the interviewer asked me why linear regression is not suitable for advanced 'classification' task. I thought it's an easy trap for me, so went ahead to answer that linear regression is for regression, not classification, so of course it's not suitable for advanced classification task; but when the conversation continues, I realize that interviewer doesn't know the difference between regression and classification, and the answer he really wants is that linear regression has lots of assumptions, making it a weak approach for advanced 'classification' task... Uhh, ok... So yes, as you can tell, machine learning is not a common tool in this team, and so if you are into predicted analytics / machine learning / AI, make sure the role you are applying is what you really want.