I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Meta in Jan 2015
Interview
I was referred to Facebook by a friend who works there and was contacted by a member of HR about a week later. We set up a date for a 45-minute technical phone interview which was to be held a week and a half later.
For the actual interview, I was first asked a couple of generic questions about myself and Facebook before moving on to the technical questions. There were two programming questions.
For the first question, I first described what my algorithm would be, then discussed time and space complexity before finally implementing it. My interviewer didn't have anything to say about my answer and we simply moved on.
I took the same basic approach to the second question; described my algorithm, discussed space/time complexity, and then implemented it. However, after discussing the space and time complexity for my potential solution, my interviewer asked me if I saw any draw-backs to my algorithm. I told him that it used a lot of extra space, and he asked if I could think of a more efficient (space-wise) solution. I thought about it for awhile, but unfortunately blanked out. He then suggested I just go ahead and implement my algorithm.
The last 5 or so minutes of the 45 minute interview were devoted to me asking questions. I asked a few, and the interview was over.
I received a generic rejection email 3 days later.
Given "data", "from", and "to" fields, replaces all occurrences of the characters in the "from" field in the "data" field, with their counterparts in the "to" field.
Example:
Input:
Data: "Hello World"
From: "lod"
To: "xpf"
Output:
"Hexxp Wprxf"
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
