Shaan flew to Seattle for a Facebook interview during an acquisition process. Instead of abstract questions, they gave him a real problem: analyze a feature-usage chart released the day before. He walked through his actual thought process, consulting the engineer who built it, and found it the best interview he'd ever done because it felt like real work.
Did I ever tell you when I interviewed at Facebook? No, I did not know that. When we were going through the acquisition process, we were going to sell to Facebook, not Twitch. They had the higher offer and they flew us out to Seattle, I guess. They were like, as a formality, like your whole team has to go through this leveling. And I was like, okay, great, I'm excited. But then a part of me was like, shit, I better not blow this one, right? They go, okay, let's pretend you just released a feature. Come in the next day and the chart of the usage looks like this. Walk me through, how would you approach that? What would you do next? I'm so dumb, but I was like, I'd go ask the guy who works on that. I'd be like, hey, do you know what's going on with this feature? And they were like, Okay, I like that. And then what would you do? I was like, well, then I'd see what he says, and then based on what he says, that'd lead to my next question. If he doesn't know, then I would do this. What a stupid interview. No, it was a great interview. It was the best interview I'd ever done. All of the questions were like this, where there were real scenarios. This is a problem-solving job, and they're trying to see how I problem solve.
