I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Aug 2013
Interview
I'm a Master student at a top CS grad school. I was doing an internship in Bay area in August and I started my process just two weeks before my last day there. Therefore the whole process was pretty fast because they (and I) want to finish all interviews before I leave so that I don't need to fly all the way from the east coast.
My friend helped me submit my resume. A few days later the recruiter contacted me via Email to schedule an initial HR interview. In this HR interview he told me great things about facebook and asked for my related experiences and why I would like to join facebook. He looks satisfied with my background and we moved forward to schedule a technical phone screen.
The phone screen went OK. I managed to code the first question in an efficient way but failed to figure out any possible way to solve its upgraded version with more constraints.
I received an email from the recruiter two days after the phone screen and was told I passed it. We scheduled an on-site interview in the same week.
The onsite interview consisted of three tech interviews. Two of them focused on pure coding/algorithm questions. One of them focused on behavioral questions and a easier coding question. I did well in one pure coding and the mixed one. I did OK in the last coding one: did not finish writing my code but the major part is clear and correct. I did make some minor mistakes and corrected them after the interviewer pointed it out.
Four days after my on-site interview, the recruiter asked me for two references. Two days later I received the offer.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
All standard algorithm/data structure questions. Nothing about brain twists or programming language or computer/network related knowledges.
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.
