I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in May 2012
Interview
Initial communication was through a recruiter, who reached out unprompted via LinkedIn. After chatting with the recruiter briefly over the phone, she quickly set me up for a phone interview, which was not that difficult/unexpected. This was followed by a half-day on-site interview, which involved lunch followed by meeting with four separate employees four 45-60 minutes each. Interviews were back-to-back, and the last interviewer escorted me back to the lobby.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The initial question (writing a function to calculate a square root) ended up being the most difficult because it threw me off. I knew there was a good iterative method for doing so, but could not recall Newton's method in the moment, and I sadly let this nagging thought get in the way of my ability to work through the problem. My failure to perform well on that question set a negative tone for the rest of the interview, since each interviewer after the first can see notes from the previous interviewers.
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
