I’m Michael. I was a principal engineer at Facebook from 2009 to 2017, where I was the top code contributor of all time and also conducted hundreds of interviews. I recently co-founded Formation.dev, an engineering fellowship that trains and refers engineers directly into big tech. Ask me Anything!

Hi! I call DS&A table stakes, you need to meet a minimum (and high) bar regardless of the others. System design at Facebook is used to determine level, so if you are an experienced frontend engineer, you might struggle on a backend interview because you don't have the same experience there. Finally, technical behavioral interviews (Facebook calls this the Jedi interview) are extremely important. They typically are looking for flags that would otherwise be missed by the other interviews. So someone who studied their way through all the other interviews might fail the Jedi interview if they can't talk about their experience in a way that would be consistent with other people at your level on that team. To answer the question directly about being disadvantaged: it depends on the seniority of the role and the company. You may or may not be.