I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (New York, NY) in May 2020
Interview
Facebook emailed me often asking me to interview for a position there, and I finally did after I was ready to leave my job. I had an initial call with a recruiter who just gave me generic information. She then scheduled a technical interview for me, and I took 2 weeks to prepare.
I did the interview on CoderPad over their video service. The interviewer didn't have the best grasp of English, so it was difficult for me to follow what they were asking. She asked me to do a simple algorithm implementation. I tried asking questions about what the expectations were for the work, and much of the time, she had difficulty explaining what she was asking, and would get flustered and realize she explained something wrong and have to walk it back.
Once I got a good grasp on the conditions and the edge cases, I set about writing out the algorithm. There was no expectation for it to actually run, so I walked her through my logic. She didn't really say much, and changed the input and asked how that would change the output and I walked her through again. She then asked me for the Big(O) of the algorithm, and I gave her my answer - which I believe was correct.
Nothing was said afterwards - I'm used to interviewers asking how I could have improved the algorithm. She left me about 3 minutes for questions for her, and that was it.
Overall, it was not a great experience. These interviews in general seem geared towards kids right out of college, and not testing the abilities of someone with over 15 years of experience (me).
I emailed the recruiter afterwards asking about next steps, and she said she'd get back to me the next week. Got a generic rejection email on Monday. I emailed asking for feedback as I was surprised, and was ignored. I sent my solution to 5 friends who are senior/principle engineers, and all of them said they have no idea why I was rejected.
I've interviewed and worked at other prestigious tech organizations, and never had an experience like this before. I'm not sure what sort of candidate they're looking to attract with this experience, but I certainly would never entertain interviewing for a job there again.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Take an array of strings, and return a boolean value if they are in order, based on another array of strings indicating the weight of each character.
Completely ghosted (it's been 2+ weeks) by my recruiter after phone screen. I'm assuming I did not pass but it's unprofessional. Expectations for the interview are quite high why so while I was able to solve both problems and explained my thinking throughout the coding process, I don't doubt that I may have messed up somewhere.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Mar 2020
Interview
- Phase 1:
Recruiter reached out, I was excited, but the recruiter kept low balling and pushing me towards "Production engineering" side. After me saying no, recruiter said they would love to have me interview for SWE openings.
- Phase 2:
Telephonic interview. Two DS and algo questions. solved both of them. discussed optimizations.
- Phase 3 (Virtual Onsite)
3.1: behavioral :- went very well, generic team and tech questions.
3.2 & 3.3 : Code interview: Two DS and algo questions each round. solved all four questions with best possible run time. discussed optimizations.
3.4 : Design interview: very egoistic my way or high way guy took the interview. he was looking at his phone all through out and his screen. I had to repeat lot of things during the interview. He got stuck on one NoSQL json DB design. After proposing two solutions I was getting to what he needed but then he said it's 45 mins, i gotta go. Later I checked online that all my design was dot correct.
- Phase4:
week1: we are reviewing
week2: we are reviewing. It is looking great and all looks positive
week3: we are reviewing. It is looking great and all looks positive
Recruiter: No, we think you are great at coding but because of designing interview it's a No. Now there is a cool off time for 1 year before you can re-interview.
Later another recruiter reached me out we have an exception if you want to go through a shorter interview for "production engineering" currently.
All in all a horrible experience. recruiter are very low balling, pushy to make you join infra team, and interviewers are all from one race, hard to communicate, and egoists.