I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Meta in Apr 2013
Interview
I applied online through Linkedin and got an email from a FB recruiter asking whether we can arrange sometime to talk on phone. We then had a quick talk on phone about what I was doing, what I had done related to software development, and how was an interview process with FB. Then he said he will arrange a phone interview for me. The first phone interviewer was nice and I can answer the question easily although I did not understand the question correctly. But he was very patient explaining it to me and I finally did it right. After a week I received an email from the recruiter saying that the response to the first interview was positive and they wanted to schedule another phone interview. The second phone interview was a week later with a Chinese girl who did not sound friendly or enthusiastic but with a cold voice. I felt that she did not like me and would not want me to be in FB since the beginning of the interview. This made me very nervous and confused, and I lost my confidence. Hence, even though the question was quite simple but I did not do it well. I can guess what happen next: I got a "thanks from FB" the day after.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The questions are easy and common, but I was very disappointed with the second phone interviewer. The first interviewer was very nice and supportive. The first question was to return the value of a roman number given in a string. The question for the second phone interview was to print out the paths to all leaves of a binary tree.
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
