I applied through university. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Meta (Palo Alto, CA) in Nov 2010
Interview
First I had a phone interview. The question was fairly straight-forward (multiply two very large numbers given as Strings) and the interviewer wasn't looking for any tricks or anything like that to solve. Like others have mentioned, quick clean code seems to be the key. Unfortunately, the interviewer had a very thick East Asian accent and talking over the phone just made things worse. I had to ask him to repeat quite a few times. It was probably me but at times I couldn't even tell when he'd asked a question because of the inflection! It must've gone well enough though because I got an on-site call.
The on-site was two interviews of 45 min each. In the first one, I took a bit of a hit because a) I couldn't see the solution right away b) it took me a while to get up to speed and code the thing - I did manage to finish it though and it seemed (relatively) bug-free. Again, as lots of people have mentioned, the interviewer seemed quite young, just a year or so out of school and he didn't offer much in terms of feedback - positive or negative - as the interview progressed. Once he'd given me the question and given me the hint that got me started, he was busy with his iPhone, rarely looking up. That kinda sucked.
The second interviewer was much nicer - probably one of the best ones I've interviewed with - lots of feedback, lots of encouragement, was accepting of different trains of thought and non-standard answers. Seemed like a really nice guy too.
Overall, it seems to be the case with Facebook that
a) Your interview really depends on who you get
b) They seem to value quick-clean-bug free-optimized code at the first try more than anything else
c) Questions are of average to above-average difficulty (if you've prepared!)
Interview questions [5]
Question 1
Write a function to take a BST and a value k as input and have it print the kth smallest element in the BST.
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.
Standard cookie cutter interview with a coding interview, a system design interview and culture interview. The coding part is basically leetcode. The system design is what you can find on many youtube videos. The culture one is more tricky as they want to see that you fit Meta's culture, not that you were doing great at your existing company. So skills like dealing with conflict without calling in managers is sought after.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
coding: I forgot, sorry
system design: design ticketmaster
culture: talk about past project; when you disagreed with a peer; how I resolved dissagreements, etc.
The interview felt more straightforward than I anticipated for a well-known tech giant. After a recruiter screen, I faced a technical round that included a DSA question about finding the lowest common ancestor in a binary tree. I was pleasantly surprised when I realized the exact problem had popped up in the algorithm practice section on PracHub during my prep. Ultimately, the experience was decent, but I chose to decline the offer as it didn’t align with my current goals.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a binary tree, find the lowest common ancestor of two given nodes in the tree.
