I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (San Francisco, CA) in Jul 2012
Interview
A recruiter has contacted me through linked-in, asked whether I'll be interested to work for them, then had a talk about why would I like to work for them and I replied: that I would like to work with the best engineers.
Afterward I had a phone interview with some engineer, asked me to write binary search, when I finished, he asked me to write binary search on a shifted array (10 20 1 2 3 4). Wrote that and then asked me to find the offset (2) in log n. I guess I did that ok and then I was invited to onsite interview.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I had 4 consecutive interviews: first one was a general talk about my experience, second was to write a json beautifer, third was to design their newsfeed, and last was to write a program that prints all subsets of size k of a given set with n integers.
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
