I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Meta in Dec 2010
Interview
I was first called by a FB recruiter and we chatted about 15 min about my general background information.
I then was followed up with a phone interview with a FB engineer. He seems to be an experienced engineer. He started with a common background question like challenge of current project. Then, he asked me to design the Facebook Credit system. I proceeded with talking about I would started with designing the backend of the system, for example a ER diagram that would outline the relationship between existing user information and the new information related to the FB Credit system. I was a little nervous at the beginning, but the interviewer jumped in and gave me some help. He then asked me how would the total credit points of a user be calculated based on my design. For that question, I answered how the data is delivered to user from end to end in a multi-tiered web application. Next is the programing question (write a function to convert an ASCII representation of a positive integer to it's numeric value). I had a subtle bug in my code, but in general I got it right. I coded in PHP, the interviewer is satisfied with it since FB uses lots of PHP. The last 5 min was for me to ask him some questions.
The interviewer was very professional and helpful during the interview. He was able to follow my thoughts and provide hints.
Interview questions [4]
Question 1
Design the Facebook Credit system which is a application where users can buy/trade virtual currency and can use the virtual currency to purchase Facebook services, like paid apps.
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.
