Facebook Engineering Manager Mock Interview: 'How do you Manage Team Performance?'

Watch our mock technical engineering manager interview. Kevin Wei (Coinbase product manager) asks Hozefa Jodiawalla (Facebook engineering manager) to answer a mock interview question about managing your team's performance.

Chapters -
00:00 - Introduction
00:40 - Question
00:52 - Answer
02:23 - Follow-up questions
13:05 - Tips

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[abhishekarora]

This guy needs to step up his management game.

[zshn]

Telling non-performers regularly that they are not performing well is sure shot way of demotivating and leading them to sabotage their self-esteem. You manage non-performers by 'leading questions': ask them to introspect on their goals, discuss actions they did / did not take i.e. retrospect, warn them once, warn them twice and ask for formal analysis report on incident/event, warn them thrice and move them out of the team.

[MyCarDriving]

I think we will never find non-performers, only under performers and framework should be to first validate the observations with the person and get 360* feedback (It should be done regularly), in this process, check how long the person is in organisation, does he get required support and tools, there are no personal or workplace issues he is being bothered with, are skills required for current work different from his earlier experience and most importantly do they like the current work. Establish a more personal trust based relationship as that helps in getting the engineer to open up to have a honest conversation. Always look at entire situation with empathy and compassion. Now if there is some personal problem, then give them space and do not consider that time period in their performance evaluation as that is the right thing to do. If skills issue then use senior/staff engineer's coaching and create a plan with the engineer, give them time to scale up, DO NOT RUSH. For example, If there is skills gap then someone might learn in 1 month, someone might learn in 2 months. it also depends on skills. Re-look at hiring process if things looks really bad. Now to assess performance, there are two things, Competency framework (defined at each level) and Goals defined for the team. I hope this helps. One last thing, keep performance management outside of appraisal, for example, suppose an engineer became under-performer in november and performance evaluation is in Jan/Feb then look at the rest of the year and not the time when he/she/they failed to perform (This is also called recency bias)

[bhanutadepalli]

I am not a manager but I can give the same answers. Is there a better mock interview which dives deep into building culture / motivate and provide mentorship

[sourabh]

Video's on this channel are really good and these mock interviews help a lot in the preparation. You all are doing a really great job.🤟

[shekharagrawal]

On 1-1s for small and large teams, I would ask a clarifying question of how many people are direct reports, the overall team size could be large but the number of direct reports might be small and you don't need to do 1-1s for non directs.

[jlouzado]

Honestly this kind of sucks... The answer feels like "my boss tells me the metrics to track and then I just sit monitor them". This didn't really show much leadership/coaching/mentoring tbh...

[ChiZhangBrian]

Makes sense facebook is going downhill

[annasuperjump]

not to be offending, personally I would think if you answer questions in this way (without showing concrete examples), you will fail the interview

[jasper]

These interviews are super helpful. Thanks a lot.

[wmtifkv]

This isn't how interviews actually take place. In a real interview they would ask to give examples of the situation, here the interviewer didn't seem to do a lot of drilling

[casualclap]

This approach is more of a micro-management....

[studio]

How do these folks get top tier jobs? These are perfunctory answers.

[sayedalawi]

The department should have goals and kpi set that aligned to overal organisation goal to achieve. Once you have the departments goals and KPI, that will delegated to individuals. Thus it will help to measure the each members of team's performance. Non performace shall asked to explain reason for not achieving his target. In this you don't need to have close monitoring or supervising all time but will allow the manager to focuss strategical planning and decision.

[contacttoakhil]

Qualities I noticed:
1. This guy showed no empathy, no inclusion, no coaching/model/care attitude for poor performers, no above and beyond support. Hiding behind company culture shows your inability to call spade a spade.
2. He is too much in micro management and by the book person. Sometimes you have to go beyond to understand the circumstances associated with an individual, it may be medical, personal or any other thing which may be bothering him/her.
3. I did not hear any single interesting example or story which can be an example for other.

P.S. I am working as an EM in MAANG company.

[ranabanerjee]

My manager decided not to let me take the 3 day off as per company policy when father in died and I had to get hr to make sure my answer knew it was 3 days, them my manager just went down hill with his feedback and yell in inspite of me fixing bugs that were created by other developers him in production. Managers who constantly give feedback just make the life of the contributing employee miserable for their ego sake. Ask Amazon if proj Alexa failed due to engineering or management

[santoshdl]

It would be better to know if we have some data or kpi that can help to measure

[learnersparadise]

How come he is at facebook, his answers are full of you know, and shallow. No doubt Meta is going down 👎

[jamshedcheema]

This is literally the worst style of management! There is more to management than tracking metrics, velocity and planning. He seems to be a micro manager. No mention of how he built a team culture, built leaders and empower teams, bringing in visibility to team and build trust

[joeybenoit]

Facebook or meta you're definitely finished throw it into the junk pile! Grab your lunch box!