Almost every software engineer, software developer, and CSE student studying in college aspires to work for the global tech giants — Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google. And that perhaps the reason behind such common queries of tech individuals like – How to crack FAANG interviews? or How to get a job in FAANG companies?
The desire is so strong that these giants together have been acronymed to FAANG (or now you can say, MAANG). And why not? These companies have been topping every chart on Glassdoor, LinkedIn, etc as the most desirable workplaces. Not just in terms of growth, and work culture but also in huge amounts of salary the FAANG companies provide to their employees.
Hence, it’s certain that a FAANG interview is one of the most nerve-wracking experiences for any software engineer, who is going to be competing with some of the best minds out there to crack this. But with the right resources and preparation, it can also become one of the proudest experiences of your life.
We are not saying that getting to your dream company is easy but it isn’t impossible either. All you need to do is pick up the relevant programming language, and try to be your best in it – from understanding the logic to its usability for developing some projects that you can showcase on your resume. Since it’s a competitive field, that too for companies that are dream landing for almost every coder, you need to pick up the right programming language and other tools & technologies.
Top Programming Languages To Crack FAANG Interviews in 2022
Now, let us walk you through some of the best programming languages to crack FAANG interviews in 2022.
Java is an object-oriented programming language that follows the principle of, “Write Once and Run Anywhere“. A truly platform-independent and general-purpose programming language that allows code reusability, easy maintenance, and data abstraction. You can run Java programs created on one OS, on any other OS as long as it supports Java Virtual Machine.
Most tech companies use Java to create desktop or mobile applications and to process a great amount of data. Java has been one of the most popular programming languages in Android app development. Amazon and other cloud computing service providers such as Microsoft also use Java in their application development.
Netflix uses Java in its backend development. While Netflix gives its developers freedom to pick languages of their choice, Java has found tremendous use and scalability for the streaming giant. For its Services Oriented Architecture (SOA), Netflix uses Spring Boot, a Java-based framework. Google uses Java in Android app development. Plus Gmail and even Google’s Web toolkit are Java-coded.
One of the key characteristics of being open-source is that the language becomes a community product, making it better, efficient, and adaptable very rapidly. Python being open-source is the most popular programming language, not just amongst programmers or developers but data scientists too due to its ability to be relatively functional in data automation, making it a natural fit for ML and also its ability to handle complex algorithms.
Having been so functional, Python continues to be simple since its elements and object-oriented approach assist programmers with syntax and logic such that they focus only on writing algorithms.
Facebook has to contribute the scalability of its infrastructure to Python. From binary distribution, automation of services and utilities, and hardware imaging to the entire infra management, engineers at Meta use Python. If you are confident in any of the 3 languages used most commonly at Facebook—Python, C++, and Hack (PHP dialect) – you can crack the interview with the right preparation. Netflix also uses Python on the server-side for data analysis. Also, Netflix uses Python to monitor security policies, SSL certificates, alerts, and search history alongside its monkey applications.
Google has a philosophy that its engineers live by, “Python where we can, C++ where we must.” Since both Python and C++ have a good interface to their libraries, both are the server-side scripting language at Google.
JavaScript, being a very versatile programming language, is heavily used across the FAANG companies. It is a programming language for beginners since it makes C++, Java, and Python learning simple afterward. Since it supports various programming concepts of OOP, functional and imperative programming, it allows interoperability and is significantly fast to run.
Its core function is to make interactive online applications and is used in Node.Js and Angular.Js, in server-side and client-side scripting respectively. A JavaScript library, React.Js helps build user interfaces.
Facebook uses JavaScript for the overall functioning of its services and pages. If you disable JavaScript on your browser, you can not log into your Facebook account. Also, Facebook uses React for creating effective web applications. Google used JavaScript to create Gmail web client, Chrome, and Google Docs.
4. C
C forms the foundation of many modern programming languages hence, it’s a good one to start with too. Easy to test, maintain and debug, C finds its use cases mostly in the development of Operating Systems, GUI (Graphical User Interface), Compilers, and other such complex software or applications. You need to know that Apple uses C in the SS X kernel of its Mac computers. Google used C to develop its Chromium browser.
Quite often, a language of choice for gaming developers, and roboticists. C++ is a low-level programming language that is high-performance in delivering complex applications. C++ has standard libraries allowing engineers to build highly portable network applications. Facebook and Amazon use C++ for some low-level infrastructure development. Google has also shaped its entire culture in C and C++. For most of the complex applications, C++ is a straight go-to for Google.
Swift was developed by Apple to create iOS applications and program various iOS devices such as iPadOS, WatchOS, macOS, and tvOS. Being influenced majorly by Python, Swift is intuitive and a highly performative programming language. Facebook also uses Swift for WhatsApp.
An intuitive, easy-to-read, super simple to maintain faster-to-write in and comes with fault-free nature – Kotlin that aids Android and iOS mobile platforms. Curated by JetBrains, Kotlin is much in demand due to its interoperability with all Java frameworks—can be easily migrated to Java.
Amazon is a Network Technology partner for Kotlin and uses it widely across Amazon Web Services (AWS), for the deployment of server-side apps to hosts that support Java. Netflix used Kotlin for rebuilding their UI player in the Android app. Google is Kotlin-pro for the development of its Android applications.
Go with Golang and you get extra points right there at Google. An open-source programming language developed by the tech giant is multi-paradigm as it enables developers to create dependable or concurrent applications. It compiles very fast hence, many programmers feel super productive using this. Also, being feature-rich, Go or Golang is super functional with its collection of packages and libraries. Google employs this programming language in several internal projects, not limited to, but including Chrome, App Engine, Earth, and YouTube.
While Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) is an old scripting language, it’s still very popular given its rich libraries including the frameworks and functional modules of graph and PDF that save coding time. Some of the PHP frameworks you should get hands-on with to crack FAANG interviews are Laravel, CodeIgniter, etc.
Not just that, it’s also a programming language for beginners, easy-to-debug, and allows working with different relational databases. Facebook is coded majorly in PHP.
10. R
Given the multitudes of opportunities around predictive analytics and data visualization, R has been quite popular. Having got its name from its developers, Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman, R is an integrated suite of software facilities for all things data. From data handling, storage, and graphical facilities to having user-defined recursive functions, loops, conditions, and a suite of operators. Plus point, you can extract data from social media platforms using the R language.
Facebook and other Meta companies use R programming for behavior analysis and social media analytics. Amazon has data scientists and researchers who use this scripting language in statistical analysis, exploratory data analysis, and machine learning. Google hires Data scientists, Cloud AI engineers, and analytical consultants with proficiency in R and uses the language for managing data, analysis of data, economic forecasting, and business decision making.
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