I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 months. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Jun 2015
Interview
Took multiple months as I was not available. The recruiter did an excellent job in making sure that I take the interview. The interview took 45 mins and started with details about my previous work experience. That took about 20 mins and then I was left with 20 mins for the programming question. He gave me a problem related to BST. Obviously I need to draw the tree etc and he cannot see that on phone interview. I started with multiple approaches and he told specifically what I need to do eg. give only recursive solution, you can only store few things no extra space. In the end i was able to solve with a minor hint and he was also telling me to fix bugs as I was coding as well indent code as per his standards. Overall it was a good experience but I did not get the offer as they are looking for people who can code in like 10 mins as I was able to code in 15-20 mins. They want bug free code and will only go forward with the best candidate. I think even if you do a minor mistake you are out as there is someone else who will solve it perfectly so try to solve it perfectly :)
Another important lesson is if you get option of phone v/s in person interview, I will say go for in person interview as it gives the interviewer the chance to see what you are doing on paper verses imagining that over phone.
Overall, the process took a little over two weeks, which felt a bit longer than I anticipated. After a quick screening, I went through two technical rounds focusing on coding and DSA concepts. One of the questions was a classic palindrome check; mid-way through, I realized it was something I had practiced on PracHub just days earlier. The final step was a casual behavioral interview. I was relieved to get an offer shortly after, which I happily accepted.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a string, determine if it is a valid palindrome considering only alphanumeric characters and ignoring case.
I applied online. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA)
Interview
It's honestly striaght from leetcode tagged
There are no surprises if you do tagged you would be good and do well.
System design is much harder. Would recommend using hello interview.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design Twitter and consider if it was suddenly an extremely low latency env
Grateful doesn't even begin to describe how I feel about landing this role. The interview loop was smooth and friendly. They kicked things off with a technical round where I faced a DSA question about verifying an alien dictionary. Lucky for me, the time I'd spent on PracHub paid off, as it had the same type of problem just days before. After that, I had a system design discussion and a behavioral interview. Everything felt very collaborative, and by the end, I received an offer that I was thrilled to accept.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a list of words written in an alien language and the order of letters in that language's alphabet, determine whether the words are sorted lexicographically (Verifying an Alien Dictionary). Walk through the comparison approach using a character-to-index map, the O(C) time complexity where C is total characters, and how you'd extend it to handle words with mixed-case letters or words containing characters outside the given alphabet.