Get that job at Facebook (2012)
I hope this doesn't sound facetious, but what I hear over and over again is that places like Facebook have difficult technical interviews that are algorithm focused to create more false negatives than false positives because they work on hard problems.What are some concrete examples of hard problems tech companies face that require novel solutions and why are algorithms problems the best way to find the people qualified to solve them?I know these seem like a naive questions, but these two things seem to be taken for granted in every interview discussion (or even if someone argues against them it's mostly a "this is how I find good people" argument). I think it's pretty clear this isn't the only way to find good people, I'd just love to hear more about the thinking behind this interview style and what it really means to these companies when they say "we deal with hard problems." The only concrete example I've ever been given is someone at another big Valley company speaking about difficulty of master-master writes between data centers at a large scale. Which certainly qualifies but I'd love to hear what other "hard problems" are out there.