How General Tso Prevented My Career At Facebook
Just before leaving for a weekend vacation with my family, I found out I had made it past the second round of interviews for a Facebook internship position. I was to have the third and final phone interview the day after I got back from the trip.
During the vacation, I studied my ass off, going through all of the Glassdoor questions multiple times. I remember sitting in the hotel room, writing code while my family was off doing enjoyable things. The day we flew back, we had a layover in Dallas/Ft. Worth international. I visited the food court for some airport-style General Tso’s Chicken. I remember it tasting a little more lukewarm and gooey than chicken should taste.

That night I woke up with food poisoning. I didn’t get a whole lot of sleep, and just tried to drink a lot of water. I got out of bed sometime around 7:00 AM, deciding to just go to campus and practice all the problems once more.
I sat in the electrical engineering basement trying to focus, my stomach quivering, my shirt drenched in sweat. Still, the physical maladies didn’t bother me as much as the fact that I knew I was in suboptimal condition for my 6:00 PM call from Palo Alto. Because the Facebook internship was such a nigh-unreachable ideal, I was spurred on, managing to practice once more all of the Glassdoor questions I had bookmarked — except one. I was drinking as much water as I could, and was even able to keep down a breakfast taco, but at noon, I simply hit a wall and could not go on.
A friend of mine let me into the Women in Computer Science Office so that I could nap. I saw HashMaps in my nightmares. When I woke up several hours later, I drove to my mom’s house to use the LAN line for a reliable connection. The first question the Facebook interviewer asked was a cakewalk. I had practiced it many times and used the minimum amount of lines necessary for Java. The second, and final question was of course the one question that General Tso had prevented me from practicing. The answer wasn’t cached in my head, and in my unfit state, I couldn’t sufficiently reason through it.
On the bright side, after the interview I felt physically great. I went and had an enormous meal followed by the twelve or so hours of sleep that usually follows a bout of food poisoning.
Originally published at www.quora.com.
