I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Meta in Sep 2010
Interview
I was contacted by the Facebook recruiter saying I need to solve one of the puzzle from the Facebook puzzles to start the interview process. I had solved one problem and then recruiter scheduled my phone interview.
The interview was good. The guy at the other end was nice and smart. The interview last for around 1 hr. It start by asking me about myself. He asked me about my choice between three platforms (linux kernel, MySql, JAVA script). I had chosen Mysql and he asked me why did I choose MySql. Other questions are described below.
I got response from the recruiter that they would like to keep me on hold, as they are finding difficulty in judging with large number of candidates.
I answered all questions correctly (I feel) except my written code (took around 10 to 15 mins) for the problem had one bug which he had noticed correctly and told me to resolve it. After resolving it he gave me the green signal.
One of the big problem (I guess one of the main factor in the interview) I faced that as I am OK with English, I was finding difficulty in understanding his accent. So many times the interviewer had to repeat his questions.
Lastly he asked me if I have any questions for them. I asked one question.
This is how end my phone interview with Facebook.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
You are going to take some numbers as an input from a file. You need to witer a program to find longest increasing sequence. You should process it as soon as you are taking an input. After finishing the last input immediately you should be able to tell the sequence.
Input: 1 5 3 4 6 4
Output: 3 4 6
Got a referral through a friend who worked at Meta, which sped up the entire process. After a casual initial chat, I went through a technical interview where I faced a DSA question about validating palindromes. The interviewer was friendly but rigorous. During prep, I had spent time with the coding challenges on PracHub, and it was funny to see a similar palindrome question pop up. Overall, I received an offer, but ultimately decided to decline it after careful consideration.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a string s, return true if it can be a palindrome after deleting at most one character (Valid Palindrome II).
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
