I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Jun 2015
Interview
I started off with a standard technical phone screen with a Facebook engineer. It was a simple coding exercise with two questions of surprisingly low difficulty. I cleared this easily.
Facebook's on-site interview process is far more rigorous, though. Each 45-min interview has a clearly defined role, intended to test you from multiple different angles. Specifically, I went through:
- 2 "Ninja" interviews (coding & algorithms)
- 2 "Pirate" interviews (system design)
- 1 "Jedi" interview (behavioral & simple coding)
plus lunch with a Facebook engineer.
The "Ninja" and "Jedi" interviews were straightforward. I hadn't seen the coding questions before, but they were not particularly hard. I would rate them as being of just average difficulty, pretty similar to the whiteboard coding questions asked at most other major Silicon Valley tech companies. And the behavioral section of the "Jedi" interview was just a friendly chat about my resume and my past experiences.
However, the "Pirate" interviews were what killed me. Both "Pirate" interviews involved being asked to propose and discuss a design for existing features on Facebook. The interviewers were extremely meticulous and questioned me on virtually every last detail of my design decisions. In particular, they focused a lot on how huge datasets should be stored and accessed to support extremely large-scale distributed systems. Even though I am already working on web-scale systems in my current job, I was nonetheless still way under-prepared for this level of technical challenge and scrutiny.
My advice to all prospective candidates is to spend most of your time preparing for the "Pirate" interviews. The coding questions aren't hard, but the system design questions will likely stretch you to your limit! (Unless you're a fresh grad--they don't ask "Pirate" questions to fresh grads. Lucky folks!)
Additional side note: interestingly, my Facebook recruiter actually gave me detailed post-mortem feedback on each and every one of my interviews. They are the only major Silicon Valley company I know that does this, so major kudos to them for being so considerate.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Can't disclose due to NDA. But as mentioned above, the coding questions are really straightforward and of merely average difficulty. It's the system design ("Pirate") questions that can be really, really challenging. Definitely spend a good portion of your time preparing for the latter!
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.