I applied through college or university. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Palo Alto, CA) in Feb 2011
Interview
They had a booth at my college job fair. I gave them my resume, and had a 1:1 interview at my college the day after. They called me at night to tell me I had made it trough the first interview and that they wanted to see me again. It went well so they invited me to Palo Alto for an on-site interview.
It was my first interview, so I might have been too stressed to think straight, but I feel like some questions were pretty hard. The first interviewers (they were 2) asked me easy questions, but the second (he gave no feedback at all) and the third interviewers asked hard questions. The last interviewer asked me: define a function that computes log2(). I gave him the Taylor expansion, and a newton's method approach, but he wanted something else... He wanted me to use sqrt(). I'm not sure whether he was assessing my skills at finding a solution given a weird constraint (e.g., use sqrt()), or if there is an obvious solution that I missed.
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
