How i Successfully failed Facebook Interview !!!

Like many other techies out there, Google and Facebook was not my 
dream company
During this quarantine , At the middle of April 2020 , I received this 

fishy email :

My first thoughts were “oh come on, how come the Gmail spam system has not detected this…”Then, after double checking the sender’s email, the email content and links ,I came to know that it actually came from Linkedln I felt weird, I’ve just received an email from a Facebook HR for a Product Security position in London: Cool!!!

My mind says : What the heck ?! Facebook is contacted me!!!!

After a couple of emails, we had our first call on April 22 . My experience with first phone call interviews is that they cannot go wrong, they exist to validate the previous emails exchanged to make sure the position matches the interviewee’s profile.

So, I presented myself and why I chose to specialize in security Engineering then, she presented the position in London in their Product Security team, how she found my profile, on LinkedIn, why she contacted me, because of my technical skills and my experience as a Security engineer, and what will the interview process be

Holy shit this opening is for Product Security Incident and Response Engineer, so I just asked for other multiple position like WebApplication/MobileApp Security , she replied ofcourse your can choose these openings too, awesome i just proceed with WebApp Security Engineer. She just took One hour interview and asked few technical question and proceed my application to next round

Facebook has 5rounds of interview first round entirely depends on HR. how you speak , your confidence, your answers to few technical question she asked etc, if she is ok with your performance then you can move to Second round, ie Technical Round with Sr.Security Engineer , following two competive Programing + technical round and atlast a HR/behaviour round

Shortly after, I received an email from HR regarding the Second round (60min) online interview with security engineer on 24^th

I was like ok lets give it a try will get some good experience

On 24^th he called me through Google Meet, he started with asking basics of application security and advance level, most of the question was from a bunch of PHP and JS code, if you can analyse the code and found out the vulnerable piece its good enough to move further , following that we have to rewrite the vulnerable code into Secure code

As I’m having good understanding on PHP , I can able to do that with some tips from him, apart from this he asked me to write some vulnerable code which showcase Insecure Deserialization, SSTI , SSRF etc, somehow I can able to write those and convince him, there are plenty of other questions he asked on Application Security level,

After 2days I  got a mail from HR saying you have successfully cleared second round lets move on to third round

Oops third round was actually a competitive programming section which usually asks question on Datastructure and Algorithm

Being a Zero Knowledge in Data Structure and Algorithm, how can i write this online exam, lets give it a try

A few days later, I received an email from the HR for the third round

Oops this was a competitive Programming environment , which is a Proctored exam,  it is  timed exams that you take while proctoring software monitors your computer's desktop, webcam video and audio , The data recorded by the proctoring software is transferred to a proctoring service for review, so no cheating is possible here

So I stared my exam on Saturday Morning with out any preparation and it was just 4omins exam which includes two competitive programming question ,

First Question having : 15min

Second question having : 25min

first one was bit easy it was directly a logical question and I can able to solve this within 15min , second one was harder for me and it was from Graph theory (which included Directed and Undirected graphs) and consists of 3 test cases to pass, but I can able to pass only one test cases after googling a lot

 so after exam , i'm pretty sure that im not going to move further rounds because of unsolved two tested cases

As expected i got a awesome mail from HR says

 My Advice to people who are looking for a job in facebook

You can learn as much from the bad interview as you can from the good ones and There’s no need to despair if you are rejected after an interview often there are things you can do to improve your chances next time
Please be good at Competitive programming , try to practice  and solve problems as much as possible  in competitive problems sites
Get an in-depth understanding about Datastructues and algorithms

ps: competitive programmings skills and normal programming skills are different 

Have a good day !!