I competed in a Kaggle competition conducted by Facebook. A few weeks after the competition ended I was contacted by a recruiter and asked a few basic questions via email. About a week after that the recruiter told me I was going to be interviewed. He also included a bunch of URLs to read so I would be familiar with the Facebook interview style. The interview was setup by a coordinator. Two days later the interview took place over the phone. The interviewer introduced himself and asked me to introduce myself by discussing my favorite project. He said my resume was too extensive to discuss. I worked in Silicon Valley for 5 years and have a significant background in software engineering. There was no discussion of the Kaggle competition. He then presented a puzzle. It involved a grid with the letters X, O, and G. X were walls, O were rooms, and G were guards. I had to create an algorithm that computed the the shortest path to each room from a guard. So if it took a guard 3 steps to reach a room, and another guard 2 steps, then you would only keep the 2. The grid was variable size (N x N). The task was to design the algorithm and then code it up in a shared web page. I had about 35 minutes to complete the puzzle. I wasn't able to get it completed. The next day I thought about it while eating lunch and the best way to solve it became clear. I was definitely on the right track during the interview, but it was simply incomplete. The puzzle itself wasn't amazingly hard. It's just the time constraints. I needed another 20 minutes or so to get it done right. A few days later I was told my background was not what they were looking for. This was a really strange thing to say because my background was never discussed. There is no doubt in my mind that my background is strong enough to work at facebook. As a matter of fact, after seeing the skills of the interviewing engineer (I looked him up on LinkedIn), I feel I'm over qualified. A few observations... This was the first time I've been interviewed by someone with significantly less experience than myself. Your past experience is irrelevant. I could have helped Steve Jobs invent the iphone but if you can't solve the puzzle then you'll be passed over. While I was working on the puzzle the interviewer gave me a "tip". It turns out that the tip was incorrect. I'm 100% positive that using an efficient solution is completely incompatible with the tip he gave me. Maybe it was part of the test. If you're good at puzzles and have a solid understand of software development, but not a lot of experience, then you should go apply. My personal impression is that they're looking for younger less experienced people. My interviewer started out as an intern so that seems to be a good alternative if you're still in college.