FAANG Interview Preparation – A Step-by-Step Guide to Crack FAANG Interview

 

The FAANG interview is one of the toughest interviews a software engineer can go through. It’s very challenging to go compete with some of the best minds in big tech companies. Proper FAANG interview preparation is a must! You must be sure you have every advantage possible to get a job out there. FAANG companies want a person who is creative and has good problem-solving skills.

We know FAANG organizations provide the best additional benefits for the employees. Some benefits include health benefits, food, transportation inclusion, parental leaves, paid leaves, stipend for training, etc. The perks act as a cherry on the top of the manifold advantages of working in Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google.The FAANG companies provide the perfect working environment to all employees and also require hard work, enthusiasm, determination, and a mindset of a winner.If you should prepare for your first interview at big tech companies, the most important book you’ll need to read is cracking the coding interview. Sometimes the knowledge and skills are not enough for cracking the FAANG interviews – despite your knowledge, there is always a chance for you still to cannot crack these interviews.There is no magic way for cracking the FAANG interviews, but there is a guided FAANG preparation and practice which will help you improve your skills and show your skills in the best possible way, during the quick interview time. The key to cracking the FAANG interviews is the structured learning, a lot of practice, and the knack to demonstrate that and to present yourself in the best light.In this article, I’ll help you prepare for interviews at FAANG companies, whether or not you are preparing for the first time.

We will cover:

FAANG interview process

Interview stages

FAANG interview questions

Behavioral questions

Situational or competency-based questions

Technical questions

Data structures and algorithms

System Design

Object-Oriented Design

1. FAANG Interview process

The interview process at FAANG is standardized.

It follows the stages below:

1.1 Interview stages

Online coding challenge

HR phone screen – After you submit your resume or a recruiter starts the process with you, first, you have an exploratory conversation with the recruiter to understand fit and gauge interest.

One round of phone interviews – For software engineers, the phone screen is a 45 mins interview over the phone + a site to write code. Typically, the questions asked here are a bit simpler – in this stage, the interviewer simply tries to ascertain if the candidate has a reasonable chance of doing well in onsite interviews.

If everything is ok then the recruiter will schedule the onsite interview date.(Virtual) onsite interview comprising around five one-hour interviews:

For software engineers, there typically are 2 coding interviews, 1–2 systems interviews, and 2–1 behavioral/resume reviews.

For junior candidates, the systems interviews may be replaced by coding;

2. FAANG interview questions

FAANG companies categorized the questions as follows:

Behavioral questions

Situational or competency-based questions

Technical questions

Coding questions (data structure and algorithms – hash tables, binary search trees, sorting algorithms, heaps, etc.

)

System design questions

3 Data structures and algorithms

Array skillsRemove Even Integers from ArrayMerge Two Sorted ArraysFirst Non-Repeating Integer in an Array,Find Second Maximum Value in an ArrayLinked List conceptsFind Length of Linked ListSearch in Singly Linked ListReverse a Linked ListFind Middle Value of Linked ListGraph ProblemsImplement Breadth-First SearchImplement Depth First SearchDetect cycle in Graph

Top 10 Graph algorithms FAANG Interview Questions

1. Breadth-First Search (BFS)

2. Depth First Search (DFS)

3. Shortest Path from source to all vertices Dijkstra

4. Shortest Path from every vertex to every other vertex Floyd Warshall

5. To detect a cycle in a Graph Union Find

6. Minimum Spanning tree Prim

7. Minimum Spanning tree Kruskal

8. Topological Sort

9. Boggle (Find all possible words in a board of characters)

10. Bridges in a Graph

I recommend you the following books for cracking the coding interview:

“Coding Interview Questions” by Narasimha Karumanchi”TOP 30 Java Interview Coding Tasks” by Matthew Urban”Elements of Programming Interviews in Java” by Adnan Aziz, Tsung-Hsien Lee, Amit Prakash”Cracking the Coding Interview” by Gayle Laakmann McDowell

4. Object-Oriented Design Interviews

Design an ATM

Design an elevator

Design a Parking System

5. How to prepare?

There a three critical things that you need to do at a minimum:

Have a powerful command over data structures and algorithms.

This is the deciding factor because 70-100% of your interview questions will be on this.You should have a deep understanding of Operating Systems concepts (paging, processes, semaphores, threads, deadlocks, etc.)

You should be good with database systems and Object-oriented programming concepts.