I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Aug 2013
Interview
The processes started with a very quick phone screening that went over my interests, why I wanted to work for Facebook, etc, which was followed up by one or two phone interviews in which I was asked to enter code into a browser and answer a few technical questions. They also asked a few questions about my resume. I took a flight to their on-site interview which included a gorgeous hotel and generous compensation for food, etc. The on-site interview was a few hours but it flew by. Some interviewers seemed experienced and others seemed like they didn't know what they were doing in the interview room. Everyone I interacted with (from phone screening to the actual interviews) seemed very organized and the entire interview process was extremely smooth. I greatly appreciated their coordination and team effort.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Most difficult questions were around systems design since the question was extremely broad, in which I was supposed to write/draw on a white board for 30-45 minutes explaining what the concept was about. Another unexpected question involved the trie data structure, it wasn't too hard, but I've never heard of it.
Got a referral through a friend who worked at Meta, which sped up the entire process. After a casual initial chat, I went through a technical interview where I faced a DSA question about validating palindromes. The interviewer was friendly but rigorous. During prep, I had spent time with the coding challenges on PracHub, and it was funny to see a similar palindrome question pop up. Overall, I received an offer, but ultimately decided to decline it after careful consideration.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a string s, return true if it can be a palindrome after deleting at most one character (Valid Palindrome II).
Recruiter call was pretty standard, first round was 2 Meta tagged LC mediums in 45 minutes. On-site was 2 coding sessions of 2 LC mediums, a system design interview and a behavioral interview with an engineering manager.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How do you answer if someone asks how long a deliverable or project will take?
The entire process usually takes 3–8 weeks, depending on scheduling and the specific role. Coding interviews heavily emphasize common DSA topics such as arrays, strings, trees, graphs, BFS/DFS, heaps, hash maps, and dynamic programming. System design becomes increasingly important for E4+ positions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given an array of integers and a target value, return the indices of two numbers that add up to the target
