I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Seattle, WA) in Jun 2015
Interview
I've applied through an employee referral and got a ping from the recruiter in about a week. After the initial chat with the recruiter to chat about FB, my interests and logistics, I got scheduled for the initial 45-minute screening. I was given two options for the screen, either phone/codeshare or an onsite visit (likely an option available for local candidates only). I chose the in-person option, and got an invite for a round of full day (5 total) within few hours after the initial screen.
Facebook recruiters send interview prep materials to the candidates on what to expect, what to brush up on, as well as some suggestions tailored to a particular candidate's weak-ish spots (in my case it was the speed of coding). I knew what to expect going in and felt well prepared on this front.
Initial screen was algorithm + coding. Nothing overly challenging.
Onsite consisted of 5 interviews (+ informal lunch) covering:
1) One "Jedi" interview with a hiring manager testing behavior / culture fit + warm-up coding. Prepare to talk about past experience, career goals, as well as several "tell me about the time when..." questions.
2) One "Pirate" interview: System design portion of the interview. There are great resources on Quora on suggestions on how to prepare and what to pay attention too.
3) Three "Ninja" interviews focusing on algorithm + coding. I actually have seen all of the questions I got asked at Facebook before, but that did not help me as ultimately the reason for rejection was cited as not being able to come up with optimal solutions and code fast enough.
Got an phone call from the recruiter in about a week+few days after the interview telling me the unfortunate news. I think I had to wait few extra days because of the July holidays and typically the process is faster.
Culture: I did find some of the junior Facebook engineers conducting my interview a bit arrogant and cocky, but nothing too alarming.
All in all, I had a positive interview experience. I wish the interview loop was better tailored towards someone more senior, e.g. less emphasis on coding, more on design. Current interview process makes it seem they hire code monkeys.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I can't discuss specifics due to NDA, but interview questions were neither overly difficult nor tricky. Check careercup and brush up on algorithms (string processing, binary trees, graphs, etc.). Practice coding fast (which potentially means forgetting good software engineering practices such as class design, refactoring as it will only slow you down).
Establish rapport with your interviewer, remember to ask clarifying questions, talk through your thinking process and solutions and you'll do well. Hopefully better than me:)
Best of luck!
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.