I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Palo Alto, CA) in Oct 2010
Interview
The rumours about the hiring process being haphazard are true. First a manager phone screened me and asked me to come to Palo Alto. Next the recruiter told me I stll need to go through a phone screen. If the disconnect stopped there it would have been OK. I did not expect to get invited to Palo Alto without a tech screen.
Here's the kicker. I am a senior engineer in my present job. The person who phone screened me was a fresh college hire and had spent about 1 month working at facebook. Facebook was that person's first job. I am not saying a new hire cannot be smarter than a senior person, but it is reasonable to think that it would be a good practice at a big company to allow new hires especially fresh out of school to settle down, understand the needs of the company and then start interviewing people.
You are trying to rob houses on a street. Each house has some +ve amount of cash. Your goal is to rob houses such that you maximize the total robbed amount. The constraint is once you rob a house you cannot rob a house adjascent to that house.
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
