Another addition to the killer interview questions collection: How many birthday posts appear on Facebook each day?.
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That question is one used by Facebook when interviewing data scientists (even when you’re as big as Facebook, a good data scientist is hard to come by). One important element that might not be immediately obvious in the question itself: it’s important to define your terms.
Facebook has upwards of 1.3 billion users, which gives you a basic number to divide by 365. But what counts as a post? Facebook reminders of upcoming birthdays? Individual “happy birthday” posts on a wall? Replies to those posts? And should you be factoring in that birth patterns aren’t necessarily distrubuted evenly?
How would you answer the question?
13 Tough Interview Questions Facebook Asks Job Candidates [Business Insider]
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4 responses to “Killer Interview Question: How Many Birthday Posts Appear On Facebook Each Day?”
are recruiters really asking this rubbish? I fear looking for a job if thats the case
It’s a valid question for a FB “data scientist” role. For Logistics you might ask about number of shipments per day, per hour, DIFOT (Delivered In Full On Time). The answer you’re looking for is not a number – but to ensure the person being interviewed can think for themselves and find a way to get an answer. 9 times out of 10 their surmises will be wrong – but it’s a great way to validate that a person can do what is written on their resume. You also wouldn’t believe how many can’t think on their feet enough to provide anything remotely like a valid answer.
I would say 1.3b divided by 365.25. I wouldn’t consider remiders as “birthday posts”, and I wouldn’t consider congrats posts as “birthday posts” either.
I have to say that everytime I read these posts, I think that some idiot just couldn’t be bothered writing a real article yet still had to meet his quota.. These are literally the stupidest articles on the internet.
If a interviewer asked me that question, then I would walk out. I would not work for a company that asks stupid questions during a interview.
That being said, Bose, Google, Apple, IBM. They all use these questions and they’re definitely not stupid.