I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Meta (New York, NY) in Apr 2013
Interview
I came onsite for what was described as an hour-long introductory and technical interview. I was greeted by the recruiter and shown around the office (FB NYC), then we chatted for 10-15 minutes. Then an engineer came in and we started the technical part of the interview, which took 45+ minutes (we ran over).
First he asked me about Hadoop, since I mentioned that I used it at my current job. I used hadoop for machine learning tasks, so we discussed the details of the system.
The rest of the interview was coding on a whiteboard. The questions got progressively more difficult.
The first was: Given two string representations of binary numbers (e.g. "1001", "10") write a function that adds them and returns the result as a string as well (e.g. "1011").
The next had several parts:
(a) first, write a function to calculate the hamming distance between two binary numbers
(b) write a function that takes a list of binary numbers and returns the sum of the hamming distances for each pair
(c) the answer I gave for b was O(n^2), I was then tasked with finding a more efficient solution. I struggled mightily, and was eventually helped to the solution by many hints from the interviewer.
After that, I had a chance to ask questions of the interviewer, and then we were done. I don't know if I've made it to the next round or not.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
(a) first, write a function to calculate the hamming distance between two binary numbers
(b) write a function that takes a list of binary numbers and returns the sum of the hamming distances for each pair
(c) find a solution for (b) that works in O(n) time.
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
