I applied through a recruiter. The process took 6 months. I interviewed at Meta in Jun 2010
Interview
The recruiter found me on linkedin and hounded me for more info about myself. 6 months and several non-technical interviews later, all of which went fine, they set up a technical interview with some guy who had such a thick accent and poor phone reception that I couldn't understand his questions, so I failed that interview and they notified me of my failure 2 days later.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I don't know because I couldn't hear the guy because his accent and his phone were so terrible. It was something about processing an array of strings in some special way.
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
Unexpectedly, the first question in the technical round felt familiar. It was about finding a subset of strings with unique character concatenation — same problem I had worked through on PracHub a few days earlier. The interview included a recruiter screen followed by a rigorous pair of technical interviews where I tackled data structures and algorithms alongside system design concepts. After successfully answering a few more challenging DSA questions, I received an offer. The entire experience was intense but ultimately rewarding, and I happily accepted the position.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given an array of strings, pick a subset whose concatenation contains no duplicate characters, and return the maximum possible length of that concatenation.
