I applied through a recruiter. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Jan 2013
Interview
After being contacted by the recruiter, I had a technical phone interview, and was then flown on-site for a detailed interview. The overall experience was excellent, with enthusiastic, encouraging people. All accommodation and transportation costs were covered. The interviews were of one of the following types: coding, cultural fit or architectural design.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How would you query for all the Places near a given coordinate? The focus is on how to scale this to a large number of places while keeping response time to within acceptable user expectacions.
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
