The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Meta (Palo Alto, CA) in Jul 2011
Interview
Was referred by an employee and then contacted by an HR. Had 3 rounds of phone interviews and then was called for onsite interviews. The questions were aimed at testing coding and design skills. They are looking for people who can write the correct code at the first go. So my advice would be that you revise all the basic algorithms, look at the common interview questions and practice a lot of coding on paper/whiteboard. The level of questions was not as difficult as Google.
Interview questions [5]
Question 1
Implement a function
char* readLine();
which returns single lines from a buffer. To read the buffer, you can makes use of a function
int read(char* buf, int len)
which fills buf with upto len chars and returns the actual number of chars filled in. Function readLine can be called as many times as desired. If there is no valid data or newline terminated string available, it must block. In order to block, it can use read function which in turn will block when it doesn't have anything to fill the buf.
Implement a function string balanceParanthesis(string s); which given a string s consisting of some parenthesis returns a string s1 in which parenthesis are balanced and differences between s and s1 are minimum.
Eg - "(ab(xy)u)2)" -> "(ab(xy)u)2"
")))(((" -> ""
How will you design facebook newsfeed. Focus was on a design which could handle the huge number of status updates and display them on each of the user's friend's wall.
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
