Monday
03Mar2008
Read This Site and Ace Your Next Interview!
Monday, March 3, 2008 at 4:58AM
Paul Tyma published a massive and massively good 96 page insider's manual on How to Pass a Silicon Valley Software Engineering Interview. My eyes immediately latched on to one of his key example scenarios, which involves scaling Facebook:
Facebook
● What was Facebook day 1?
– A database with a PHP front-end
● In PHP, Java, C#, whatever
– How long would it take you to reproduce Facebook's first incarnation?
● A single MySQL instance with some simple queries probably used to happily query the whole userbase.
Facebook
● What is it today?
● Its not about “that stuff you learned in school”
– Its about what a company with thousands of (possibly conflicting) queries per second operating
on a directed-graph with 50 million nodes
● And of course a few Petabytes of data
● And 99.99% uptime
● Design decision? A Facebook user is (or recently was) currently limited to 5000 friends.
If you've been reading all the wisdom contributed to and referenced by this website you might just rock this interview and put a little more money in your pocket. So this site isn't a total waste of time :-)
Yet I wonder how we can have 96 pages on interviewing and still not talk about software development at all?
● What was Facebook day 1?
– A database with a PHP front-end
● In PHP, Java, C#, whatever
– How long would it take you to reproduce Facebook's first incarnation?
● A single MySQL instance with some simple queries probably used to happily query the whole userbase.
● What is it today?
● Its not about “that stuff you learned in school”
– Its about what a company with thousands of (possibly conflicting) queries per second operating
on a directed-graph with 50 million nodes
● And of course a few Petabytes of data
● And 99.99% uptime
● Design decision? A Facebook user is (or recently was) currently limited to 5000 friends.
If you've been reading all the wisdom contributed to and referenced by this website you might just rock this interview and put a little more money in your pocket. So this site isn't a total waste of time :-)
Yet I wonder how we can have 96 pages on interviewing and still not talk about software development at all?
Reader Comments (2)
Where is this 96 page manual? The link to the site only makes reference to a slide deck for a talk.
YesYes its not 96 page manual, these are 96 slides prepared for some talk