I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Meta in Oct 2012
Interview
Was contacted by recruiter through linkedin profile. Had a initial phone interview with collabedit. Was not offered an onsite interview.
Was asked to write a program that would take a filename and a search pattern as arguments and return if the pattern matches the filename. Wildcards * and ? can be used in the pattern.
eg:
1. filename: file.txt pattern: f*txt result pattern matches
2. filename:file.txt pattern:f?le* result: pattern matches
Answer:
bool matchFilename(const string& flname, const string& patter)
{
for (int i=0,j=0;i<flname.length(),j<patter.length();i++,j++)
{
if (patter.at(j)=='*')
{
if (j+1<patter.length())
{
i = flname.find(patter.at(j+1),i+1);
i--;
}
}
else if (patter.at(j)=='?')
{/*do nothing*/}
else
{
if (flname.at(i)!=patter.at(j))
return false;
}
}
return true;
}
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What is the most exciting thing about the current project Im working on
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.
