I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Jul 2013
Interview
Application was via an internal referral from a friend who used to work at a start-up I was at. He put me in their system and around 4 days later, a recruiter called for first contact.
The recruiter was quick to assess what I have done and decide to bring me straight in for a 1h30 min interview the next week. In this session I got a quick "hi" from the recruiter and then two 30 min slots, one on architecture and design (so called pirate interview) and the other on coding (ninja). Of the 2, I stormed the coding question but met with an interviewer in the pirate side that had tailored a question from his previous experience in the area I had recently worked in and it didn't work out (mostly as I knew more about the topic and the interviewer wanted to talk about a specific trick he knew). Still, I got called back the next week for a full day.
Lunch, more coding, culture interviews etc... Coding and design were knockouts again, the softer skills were less successful. I think the key here is that you need to present a confident, well rehearsed personality with answers for the usual questions (biggest mistake etc...). DO NOT talk about mistakes and then admit you don't know the root cause for them, even if they were true mysteries. Pick another example!!!
The process took ~4 weeks, the end dragging out by 2 weeks as it seems they could not decide if it was a hire or not. I had multiple offers by this time and had to take one that was expiring and too good to miss. Later I found that there was no hire decision and felt ok about it - I would probably think about going back at some point, but with a stronger prep in the softer skill Q+A side.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
If you go through the career cup questions, all 3 of my questions were on there. One of them I only had 15 mins to answer (the most difficult one) due to over running.
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.