I applied online. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at Meta (San Jose, CA) in Sep 2015
Interview
I applied to Facebook through their website and got a call from the recruiter the next day. He asked the standard screening questions and set up a technical phone screen for later that week.
The phone screen was done using coderpad.io, and they threw me off from the very beginning by setting up a C++ environment although I had told the recruiter that I was most comfortable in Python and although I never claimed anywhere that I had any familiarity with C++. Still, interview questions tend to be general enough that, as long as you aren't completely unfamiliar with the language syntax, you can generally do a decent job in any language. So off we went in C++.
The interviewer was very pleasant, and even gave me some tips for how to improve my resume at the beginning. Then we dived into the coding. He had actually chosen a great question to determine my programming ability. Unfortunately, I botched it by making too many assumptions about the question and not considering carefully enough what lay behind the interface that the interviewer had provided me.
This all happened maybe two or three weeks ago and I am sure that I won't be progressing to the next step. The one negative in all this is that the recruiter has not followed up at all with me. Yes, rejection is not uncommon when applying at a company like Facebook, but that doesn't mean that the company shouldn't have the courtesy to at least inform you of it.
So overall, great experience in the beginning but I was turned off by the lack of respect for the process that I sensed from the recruiter.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a buffer-like interface from which you can only read data in chunks of a fixed size, implement a reader which can read as many bytes as it wants from this interface.
Overall, the process took a little over two weeks, which felt a bit longer than I anticipated. After a quick screening, I went through two technical rounds focusing on coding and DSA concepts. One of the questions was a classic palindrome check; mid-way through, I realized it was something I had practiced on PracHub just days earlier. The final step was a casual behavioral interview. I was relieved to get an offer shortly after, which I happily accepted.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a string, determine if it is a valid palindrome considering only alphanumeric characters and ignoring case.
I applied online. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA)
Interview
It's honestly striaght from leetcode tagged
There are no surprises if you do tagged you would be good and do well.
System design is much harder. Would recommend using hello interview.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design Twitter and consider if it was suddenly an extremely low latency env
Grateful doesn't even begin to describe how I feel about landing this role. The interview loop was smooth and friendly. They kicked things off with a technical round where I faced a DSA question about verifying an alien dictionary. Lucky for me, the time I'd spent on PracHub paid off, as it had the same type of problem just days before. After that, I had a system design discussion and a behavioral interview. Everything felt very collaborative, and by the end, I received an offer that I was thrilled to accept.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a list of words written in an alien language and the order of letters in that language's alphabet, determine whether the words are sorted lexicographically (Verifying an Alien Dictionary). Walk through the comparison approach using a character-to-index map, the O(C) time complexity where C is total characters, and how you'd extend it to handle words with mixed-case letters or words containing characters outside the given alphabet.