I applied through an employee referral. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (New York, NY) in Mar 2019
Interview
I applied through a friend’s referral at the nyc office.
First was the phone interview. Coding on a shared document. Tough graph question. Had some trouble and had to ask for a hint at one point but eventually got the correct solution. Heard back a couple days later they were going to bring me on-site.
On-site was a week and a half later and had two coding interviews, lunch, then a behavioral interview with coding second half, then systems design interview.
First coding interview: first problem went very smoothly. Medium level problem involving using a stack. Of course asking clarifying questions first. Second problem was a tree traversal problem. I just could not come up with the “intended” optimal solution.. ended up having to go with the “dumb” solution which I believe still had the same order of time and space complexity anyway, but was a bit ugly.
Second coding interview: this interview has easy coding problems.. I think maybe they were testing to see my communication and absolute code perfection over intelligent solutions here? First problem was a personal finance problem to calculate tax owed given income and tax brackets . Second problem was to, given a blank NYT crossword puzzle, output where the “clues” would be (i.e. where does “1 across” start and how long is it etc.)
Lunch was lunch
Behavioral: didnt prep too much but i came across as authentic because of it. I don’t know if there’s really a good way to prep for this. Soft skills come with time. One question I literally said “i don’t really find myself in those situations at work” which was fine I guess. The coding part of this interview was actually pretty rocky. Had to add two binary numbers (represented as strings I.e. “10110”). I believe this was also just to test communication and thought process.
Systems design: problem was design a simple version of Instagram which allows users to see Friends’ images in a feed and also go to friends’ accounts to get that persons images. To prep, look at the material the recruiter will give you. They gave me a GitHub link with a bunch of practice systems design questions and example solutions. Just learn what “kind” of solution they are looking for and that will get you halfway there. (They want boxes and arrows representing the different components and how they interact). I only prepped for systems design the night before and was fine. It didn’t even go that amazingly, I had a hard time figuring out how to get the latency down for refreshing the feed, which required what I considered significant help.
A week and a half later I got an offer.
Interview questions [6]
Question 1
Given a mathematical expression in prefix (+ 5 (* 7 8) 9 10 33) evaluate it.
Generic LeetCode-style questions, many tagged as Meta, so extensive preparation is required to perform well in the technical interview. The experience varies significantly - some interviewers provide hints and guidance, while others expect candidates to solve problems independently with minimal assistance.
Spoke with interviewer over video conferencing. He was very communicative . He answered my questions. Asked me BFS question. A question that involved BFS search. Given a matrix, I am suppose to find a path from top left to down right.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
A question that involved BFS search. Given a matrix, I am suppose to find a path from top left to down right.
The technical round hit me with a classic array manipulation problem: moving zeroes to the end without disrupting the order of non-zero elements. As I tackled it, I felt a wave of familiarity wash over me; I had just practiced a similar challenge on PracHub. The rest of the interview followed a straightforward path, with some easy behavioral questions sprinkled in. Overall, it felt very easy, but I wasn’t quite the right fit for what they needed, so I didn’t receive an offer.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Move zeroes in an array to the end while keeping non-zero element order, in place