FAANG / Tech Companies Interview Terminology and Process
An overview of terminology for interviews in the tech / CS industry.
Overview
This article will cover new grad and intern hiring process mainly. But has relevant terms even for those in industry.
Terminology:
The interview process tends to be broken up into 3 main points:
Leetcode: A website where you study coding questions that are often given during the interview process.
Online Interview: Which is an online coding round to filter out candidates
Phone Interview: Which is usually a single round (45 mins) to screen candidates
Final Round (Onsite) (Super day): Which for interns usually only consist of one round; full time / industry consists of 3-5 rounds. P.S an “onsite” now does not actually mean you go in person. Is a legacy from before covid.
Technical Rounds: Leetcode-like / algorithm questions.
Behavioral Round: What it sounds like, behavioral rounds.
Hiring Manager Rounds: Where you talk with a hiring manager, usually behavioral focus, dives into your history, sometimes they ask a light Leetcode question, can highly depend.
Some companies will have different process, such as some companies will not have an OA, some companies will skip the phone interview, some companies will have interns and new grads both do 3-5 rounds for the hiring process so on, but the general structure is the same.
It generally consists of OA / Phone / Final Round.
Intern Process
Intern processes tend to consist of OA/Phone rounds + a final round. Depending on the company they may have OA > Final round, or OA > Phone > Final, or Phone > Final.
Internship processes tend to have their final round only consist of one technical round, making it generally much easier to get.
New Grad:
New grad roles tend to go from from OA/Phone > Final round, where the final round, can consist of 2-3 technical rounds + 1 behavioral round.
Notes for Internship / New Grads:
You don’t need to study system design, such as how to build a scalable instagram clone. System design tends to be only for industry mid-level engineers. At most some companies might ask you very high level ideas of how to build a system such as, what is a load balancer, caching, so on. But definitely not to the rigor of a system design interview. And I wouldn’t study anything about even the “high level system design interview” unless you know for sure that the company will have it such as Netflix and Palantir. Otherwise most companies only do Leetcode questions.
You should be able to build a basic class + methods. Such as if I ask you to create an LRU cache . While “class” questions are uncommon, it essentially is still Leetcode, but I find a lot of people have trouble with it if it is unexpected. You don’t need to particularly study this in my opinion, unless you have trouble with class-based questions, but it really is just a basic extension of data structures and leetcode.
Exceptions:
Always double check the company however. For example, Bloomberg for both interns and new grads have everyone do a 3 technical rounds + 1 hiring manager round. So in terms of the number of rounds is the same.