I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 months. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Jun 2015
Interview
Took multiple months as I was not available. The recruiter did an excellent job in making sure that I take the interview. The interview took 45 mins and started with details about my previous work experience. That took about 20 mins and then I was left with 20 mins for the programming question. He gave me a problem related to BST. Obviously I need to draw the tree etc and he cannot see that on phone interview. I started with multiple approaches and he told specifically what I need to do eg. give only recursive solution, you can only store few things no extra space. In the end i was able to solve with a minor hint and he was also telling me to fix bugs as I was coding as well indent code as per his standards. Overall it was a good experience but I did not get the offer as they are looking for people who can code in like 10 mins as I was able to code in 15-20 mins. They want bug free code and will only go forward with the best candidate. I think even if you do a minor mistake you are out as there is someone else who will solve it perfectly so try to solve it perfectly :)
Another important lesson is if you get option of phone v/s in person interview, I will say go for in person interview as it gives the interviewer the chance to see what you are doing on paper verses imagining that over phone.
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
Unexpectedly, the first question in the technical round felt familiar. It was about finding a subset of strings with unique character concatenation — same problem I had worked through on PracHub a few days earlier. The interview included a recruiter screen followed by a rigorous pair of technical interviews where I tackled data structures and algorithms alongside system design concepts. After successfully answering a few more challenging DSA questions, I received an offer. The entire experience was intense but ultimately rewarding, and I happily accepted the position.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given an array of strings, pick a subset whose concatenation contains no duplicate characters, and return the maximum possible length of that concatenation.
