I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Meta in Dec 2010
Interview
I was first called by a FB recruiter and we chatted about 15 min about my general background information.
I then was followed up with a phone interview with a FB engineer. He seems to be an experienced engineer. He started with a common background question like challenge of current project. Then, he asked me to design the Facebook Credit system. I proceeded with talking about I would started with designing the backend of the system, for example a ER diagram that would outline the relationship between existing user information and the new information related to the FB Credit system. I was a little nervous at the beginning, but the interviewer jumped in and gave me some help. He then asked me how would the total credit points of a user be calculated based on my design. For that question, I answered how the data is delivered to user from end to end in a multi-tiered web application. Next is the programing question (write a function to convert an ASCII representation of a positive integer to it's numeric value). I had a subtle bug in my code, but in general I got it right. I coded in PHP, the interviewer is satisfied with it since FB uses lots of PHP. The last 5 min was for me to ask him some questions.
The interviewer was very professional and helpful during the interview. He was able to follow my thoughts and provide hints.
Interview questions [4]
Question 1
Design the Facebook Credit system which is a application where users can buy/trade virtual currency and can use the virtual currency to purchase Facebook services, like paid apps.
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
