I applied through a recruiter. The process took 5 months. I interviewed at Meta in Aug 2024
Interview
Spoiler: This was my second time doing a Meta onsite with no offer.
A Meta recruiter reached out to me, as they do every year, and invited me to do a technical phone screen. I passed and went to the onsite. I didn't hear back for like 2 weeks so I contacted my recruiter a few times for potential feedback, since I thought I did well, and a request to possibly be down-leveled (this was mentioned to me as a possibility during my prep call) but was ignored and got an automated rejection email. They also didn't honor my request to speak with someone at Meta about the company, which is an option in the candidate portal. Bad experience. The coordinator also rescheduled my onsite 3 different times. I'm kinda over the idea of working at Meta now.
Got a referral through a friend who worked at Meta, which sped up the entire process. After a casual initial chat, I went through a technical interview where I faced a DSA question about validating palindromes. The interviewer was friendly but rigorous. During prep, I had spent time with the coding challenges on PracHub, and it was funny to see a similar palindrome question pop up. Overall, I received an offer, but ultimately decided to decline it after careful consideration.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a string s, return true if it can be a palindrome after deleting at most one character (Valid Palindrome II).
Recruiter call was pretty standard, first round was 2 Meta tagged LC mediums in 45 minutes. On-site was 2 coding sessions of 2 LC mediums, a system design interview and a behavioral interview with an engineering manager.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How do you answer if someone asks how long a deliverable or project will take?
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
