The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Meta in Feb 2011
Interview
I got my resume submitted through an existing employer at Facebook. Was first contacted by a recruiter who called me up and had a half hour talk with me discussing why I wanted to join Facebook, and surprisingly also started asking me data structures and C++ basics like friend functions, complexity of searching and sorting etc (though she assured me that this was not an interview and only an informal chat). I got all her questions correct, though I donot know if that made any difference. I followed up with her sending her an email regarding scheduling an interview and then she wrote back gconfirming a phone interview slot. It was a phone screen with a Software Engineer at Facebook, and I was asked to code in Collabedit, a web interface in which both I and he could write and see the code.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
You are given intervals of contiguous integers, like [1, 10), [15, 25), [40, 50), which are non-overlapping and of a fixed size.
Design a data structure to store these intervals and have the operations of insert, delete, and find functions
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
