I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Meta (Seattle, WA) in Nov 2014
Interview
1 Behavior/Past experience
2 Ninja
3 Lunch (not rated)
4 Design
5 Ninja
The behavior interview is about 1 hour, just talking about your past and current experience and projects you have done, plus a 15 mins coding test.
first Ninja is an opening question, essentially creating your own question based on a scenario and do some coding. My experience was really good so you have the flexibility to design questions you are familiar with.
Lunch was chat with a senior team lead, relax and get to know what you want to know.
Design was easy for me, since I have done a similar system at my current job.
the last ninja really sucked, the question is about a really unconventional event processing model using "pulling" instead of standard "push" model (like Storm), and the interviewer does not talk much and was not happy when I proposed the much simpler and intuitive push model. I failed on this one.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The second ninja (coding) test was about event processing system using pulling model, which literally no one in the industry is using.
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
