I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at Meta in Sep 2013
Interview
Recruiter contacted on LinkedIn. Set up phone screen for a few days later, which consisted of basic behavioral questions and some technical questions (basically questions passed to the recruiters by engineering to weed out super weak candidates). Then a technical phone screen with an engineer. First a basic coding question. Second question was a weird one. It was basically a language specific question related to how to modify the default behavior of a certain class. I spent the rest and a long portion of the interview trying to understand what exactly needed to be done and couldn't come up with a solution at all. Then I asked the interviewer how what he was asking could be achieved and he told me about a similar class that would provide that capability. Since I had no idea about that class (and there's really no reason for anyone to know it off top of their heads), I wasted a lot of time trying to solve something that I could have never solved. This was akin to a trick question and obviously very flawed to ask to a software engineer to assess any analytical skills whatsoever. Then chit chatted with the engineer about Facebook but it was obvious that neither side wanted to engage in anymore conversation. Got a rejection email from the recruiter I believe a couple days later.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
A seemingly analytical coding question which couldn't be solved at all if you didn't know a certain class.
Overall, the process took a little over two weeks, which felt a bit longer than I anticipated. After a quick screening, I went through two technical rounds focusing on coding and DSA concepts. One of the questions was a classic palindrome check; mid-way through, I realized it was something I had practiced on PracHub just days earlier. The final step was a casual behavioral interview. I was relieved to get an offer shortly after, which I happily accepted.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a string, determine if it is a valid palindrome considering only alphanumeric characters and ignoring case.
I applied online. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA)
Interview
It's honestly striaght from leetcode tagged
There are no surprises if you do tagged you would be good and do well.
System design is much harder. Would recommend using hello interview.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design Twitter and consider if it was suddenly an extremely low latency env
Grateful doesn't even begin to describe how I feel about landing this role. The interview loop was smooth and friendly. They kicked things off with a technical round where I faced a DSA question about verifying an alien dictionary. Lucky for me, the time I'd spent on PracHub paid off, as it had the same type of problem just days before. After that, I had a system design discussion and a behavioral interview. Everything felt very collaborative, and by the end, I received an offer that I was thrilled to accept.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a list of words written in an alien language and the order of letters in that language's alphabet, determine whether the words are sorted lexicographically (Verifying an Alien Dictionary). Walk through the comparison approach using a character-to-index map, the O(C) time complexity where C is total characters, and how you'd extend it to handle words with mixed-case letters or words containing characters outside the given alphabet.