The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Meta (Palo Alto, CA) in Feb 2009
Interview
The interview consisted of two parts.
The first part was a basic screening my the HR person through a set of e-mail questions regarding preferences of work, technology experience, etc. The second part consisted of a phone conversation with one of the the Facebook engineers where he asked questions regarding current employment responsibilities, why the interest in Facebook, etc. He then proceeded to ask a simple technical question which you had to provide a solution for on the spot through a web application from which he could see you typing (a bit nerve wrecking).
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a list of strings, for each string, find if it has an anagram in the list.
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
Unexpectedly, the first question in the technical round felt familiar. It was about finding a subset of strings with unique character concatenation — same problem I had worked through on PracHub a few days earlier. The interview included a recruiter screen followed by a rigorous pair of technical interviews where I tackled data structures and algorithms alongside system design concepts. After successfully answering a few more challenging DSA questions, I received an offer. The entire experience was intense but ultimately rewarding, and I happily accepted the position.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given an array of strings, pick a subset whose concatenation contains no duplicate characters, and return the maximum possible length of that concatenation.
