The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Meta in Oct 2011
Interview
First, a group of Facebook employees came to my campus to conduct on campus interview. There were 2 rounds of on campus interview - you had to pass the first round in order to get to the second. After the 2 rounds, you should be notified whether or not you receive the job. However, they asked me to complete a third and final phone interview. It took several weeks to schedule, but finally I had the phone interview.
In the first interviews, I was only asked coding questions. The third was more behavioral, but we ended with a coding question.
Interview questions [4]
Question 1
Given a tree, print the values contained at each level on the same line.
So if you had the tree with root A, and children B and C, you would print:
A
B C
Find the min and max in an array. Now do it in less than 2n comparisons. (they were looking for the solution that finds both max and min in about 3/2 n comparisons).
Compute the square root of a number down to a certain precision.
ie sqrt(num, precision) returns a number that is in-between sqrt(num) - precision and sqrt(num) + precision.
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
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.
