Candidates applying for Software Engineer roles take an average of 7 days to get hired, when considering 2 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Meta overall takes an average of 42 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Meta as a Software Engineer according to 2 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 67%
Skills test: 33%
Here are the most commonly searched roles for interview reports -
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Jun 2012
Interview
Got a mail from a recruiter asking me if I am interested.
Then he scheduled a coding interview on Skype. They instructed me before this interview to go over all of the CS basics.
I did the interview, was OK, and then I was invited to an on-site interviews day.
Although I live outside of the US they had no problem flying me over, they paid for all expenses and arranged this whole thing in one week(!!).
At the campus I had 4 interviews:
1 X design "high level" interview.
1 X manager interview, we talked a lot about the product(s), company's culture and my background. (And a short coding questions in the end)
2 X white board coding interviews.
After the first two interviews I had lunch with this extremely nice recruiter and she also gave me a tour in the campus which was really cool.
Couple of days after the on-site day I was contacted and they told me that they need to interview me some more because there was a miss match within the feedbacks I got.
We set up another session of two consecutive Skype coding interviews which were really good and after couple of days I was informed that they want to send me an offer ;-)
Total 7 interviews.
5 of them were coding.
TIPS:
* Get extremely comfortable with CS undergrad material:
classic algorithms, data structures, sorting, string manipulations(!!), lists, trees, basic linear algebra, working with large data sets.
Don't only read about these topics - make sure you can code it, fast and accurate!!
In the Skype/Phone interviews they asked me to write the code in http://collabedit.com.
[I am not allowed to disclose the specific questions... sorry]
* If you are reading this review then you are on the right track - I practiced only by answering questions which were posted on this site. I first tried to solve them alone, when stuck I checked the answers section and on StackOverflow.
* Make sure you are well familiar with this company and its product. It will come up in every interview and especially in the manager interview.
Be ready to give great answers on "Why facebook?" - I think all 7 interviewers asked me this question and it's really important to them.
* For non US residents - Make sure you arrive to the bay area couple of days before so you'll be able to rest and beat the jet-leg. I've arrived 24 hours before, couldn't sleep because of the excitement and jet-leg, I think that being really tired (especially after lunch) affected my performances.
BOTTOM LINE -
Challenging for a position at FB is huge and you have to invest a lot of time and effort into it. At least that was the case for me, I studied real hard and almost didn't make it.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
String manipulation, Trees, Lists, sort, basic linear algebra...
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Meta in Jun 2012
Interview
I got contacted by an HR. After some email traffic, I got a skype call with HR to discuss the interview process.
I solved a puzzle at interviewstreet and they set up an appointment with the engineer at California.
Technical Phone interview lasted 30 mins. Interviewer was friendly but he immediately asked for live coding (in 6-7 mins). And because of he is Indian, it was very difficult to understand him as a not native English speaker.
He asked for a technical question, wanted to optimize code, and then told me the interview is over.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
You have a file consists of billions of records.
It cannot fit into memory, so you need to reverse every word in that file and save to another file.