Software Developer applicants have rated the interview process at Meta with 4 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 67% positive. To compare, the company-average is 74.2% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Software Developer roles take an average of 14 days to get hired, when considering 3 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Meta overall takes an average of 43 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Meta as a Software Developer according to 3 Glassdoor interviews include:
Skills test: 50%
One on one interview: 50%
Here are the most commonly searched roles for interview reports -
Got referred through a friend at FB. They contacted me 1-2 weeks later via email. Set up a phone chat that the recruiter initially missed, but we rescheduled. Once we had a phone conversation she said they can move really fast: ~1 week to make an offer.
I went on site for a first round interview (since I'm local to the area). The interviewer was nice. She asked me to describe what I work on now. Then we jumped into two coding problems. I interpreted the problem as a Hamming Distance problem and asked if it was, she kind of shrugged it off -- I don't think she knew what Hamming Distance meant. I coded a solution on a laptop (new trial process they were doing), but it turned out we were not talking about the same problem. In retrospect, the problem she was describing was Levenshtein Distance. I had the feeling she only knew the solution to the problem because she had the answer sheet.
The second problem was another classic DP problem. Finding the sum of 1's in a submatrix. I went on to describe the recurring relation for the subproblem in the linear case. She didn't want me to do that and she quickly said the solution to the 2D case was a generalization of the 1D case.
Because of the novelty of the laptop in the interview and the misunderstanding of the initial problem, the recruiter fought for me to do another phone screen even though the first one didn't go that well.
The second interview I opted for a phone interview. This time the interviewer seemed more knowledgable and came into FB through an acquisition. I was asked what I work on now and some hard problem I solved in the past. Again two interview questions were asked (using collabedit). The first was to list out all the paths in a binary tree which was simple. I did make some mistakes and corrected it in the code as we talked through use cases. The second problem was checking if a string was a palindrome for strings with symbols and spaces in them which again is easy. I did solve both problems, but in the beginning the interviewer stated he's looking for accuracy and performance. My tree traversal was a simple preorder traversal using recursion and the palindrome involved one loop.
Apparently the second interview did not go well even though I provided correct solutions in both. I guess the interviewer was serious when he said he's looking for correctness -- I guess you need to be able to code compilable/error-free code in a text editor.
The recruiter and onsite coordinator were very helpful and the interviewers were very friendly. However, the style of FB interviews seems to be that you should study and know by heart common interview puzzles/algorithms/DP problems and be able to reproduce that error free.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Levenshtein Distance, Sum of 1's in a submatrix, Print all paths of a binary tree, Palindrome
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in May 2013
Interview
I originally applied online and spoke with one recruiter. She did not feel I was a good fit for the team she was recruiting for but referred me to another recruiter at Facebook. I spoke with the second recruiter on the phone and she set a technical interview on-site in Menlo Park. The guy who interviewed me was very nice and while I didn't do a great job on the question, they liked me enough to schedule a full day of interviews.
After some preparation, I came onsite for a full-day of technical interviews with a lunch break in the middle. The pace was very fast but I knew it would be like that so I was prepared. The questions were difficult especially in the limited amount of time. Everyone was very nice. There was a design round where I was asked to design an iPhone app that was unrelated to social networking.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
A lot of people asked about my experience in writing iPhone apps and what was challenging about it.