I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Meta in Jun 2013
Interview
I was contacted by a recruiter via telephone. The phone conversation was simple enough to warrant a trip to the office. The office was nice- catered food, and unlimited soda and candies. The first round interview lasts about 1 hour and consists of questions (no surprise) asking about time complexities calculation and data structures. Make sure you at LEAST know tree traversals before you go into the interview. Given the short time limit, feel free to ask your interviewer for help to speed up your answering.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Questions were purely academic, nothing unexpected.
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
