The Unconventional Power Move: Solving a Facebook Interview in LabVIEW
Description
This image is a screenshot of a tweet from the user 'L3 Tweet Engineer' (@MegaBasedChad). The tweet reads: 'The most bizarre coding interview I've ever done was at Facebook when as usual I asked a candidate to write in any language of their choice.. And they nonchalantly said "I'll write it in LabVIEW", to which I almost let loose a chuckle until...'. Below the text is an image of an extremely complex LabVIEW program, which is a graphical programming environment. The screen is filled with interconnected blocks, wires, and nodes, creating a visually dense and chaotic diagram that resembles a convoluted electronic circuit schematic. The humor stems from the sheer absurdity of choosing LabVIEW, a niche language typically used for industrial automation and data acquisition, for a mainstream software engineering interview at a company like Facebook. The visual chaos of the diagram serves as the punchline, implying the candidate produced something incredibly complex and unreadable to the average developer, turning the interviewer's initial amusement into shock or awe
Comments
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The candidate who solves a graph problem in LabVIEW during an interview doesn't just get the job; they get a purchase order for a PXI chassis and a team of hardware engineers to maintain their code
We stopped the interview when his LabVIEW solution passed all tests but the pull-request diff just read “Binary files differ” - turns out our entire review process wasn’t type-safe for pixel art
When you've spent 20 years explaining to management that code complexity isn't measured by how colorful the IDE is, and then someone walks into your interview and proves you wrong
When they said 'any language,' they probably expected Python or Java, not a visual programming environment typically used for controlling oscilloscopes anddaq systems. The interviewer's suppressed chuckle perfectly captures that moment when you realize the candidate is technically correct - the best kind of correct - but you're now facing a whiteboard session that looks like a circuit diagram had a baby with a flowchart. Bonus points if they actually solved the problem, because debugging that spaghetti of wires would make any merge conflict look trivial
Pro tip: don’t say “any language” unless your rubric can score implicit parallelism and the number of pink wires - otherwise your big‑O talk becomes cable management
LabVIEW for LeetCode: dataflow execution so parallel, it short-circuits the interviewer's mental model faster than a floating-point wire
Say 'any language' in a coding interview and a LabVIEW veteran will turn your Big-O rubric into a wiring-density metric - suddenly you're grading patch panels instead of pseudocode