I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Palo Alto, CA) in Apr 2011
Interview
A recruiter found my resume online and emailed me asking if I would be interested in opportunities with Facebook. We then spoke on the phone and she scheduled my first technical interview. Throughout the process the HR person was very friendly and helpful.
The technical interviews were conducted using Skype and collabedit.com. They consisted mostly of algorithms and data structures questions, and a few questions about projects I had mentioned on my resume. The first two interviewers were very friendly and positive, and I felt the interviews went very well, having answered all the questions correctly. The last interview was conducted by a grumpy engineer with a thick accent who was running 15 minutes late and sounded like he didn't want to be there. Unfortunately this put me off quite a bit, and I did not perform very well in that interview, 3 days later I heard back from HR that they wouldn't be proceeding with on-site interviews in Palo Alto.
Interview questions [4]
Question 1
Print a singly-linked list backwards, in constant space and linear time.
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.
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.
