I applied through a recruiter. The process took 5 months. I interviewed at Meta (London, England) in Apr 2025
Interview
Phone Screen - Two leetcode questions
Onsite - behavioural (project that I'm proud of, hardest professional relationship, project that grew with scope), 2x leetcode (each with two questions as well), system design
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a service to post status updates and supports full-text search
I was two DSA question one related to DFS and another related to strings.
Tree Question :
Find the diameter of the given tree.
String Question :
Check palindrome by removing at most one letter
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Tree Question :
Find the diameter of the given tree.
String Question :
Check palindrome by removing at most one letter
I applied online. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Aug 2025
Interview
Initial coding interview over video was very nice.
Then the "loop" interviews were horrible:
1. They allow all interviews to be conducted by video from home. This allows well-qualified and sophisticated candidates to setup cheating with AI and a human assistant. From your home, it is easy to do and impossible to detect. This would give them the edge where there are many qualified candidates for a job. When such a candidate is hired, they do very well, and are not fired for poor performance. Meta does not care that many of their hires may have subtly cheated.
Final interviews should always be conducted in person.
To prove that I am not cheating, I offered to come in person.
2. Interviews started late because they were late to bring me to the office.
3. For the coding interviews, I was given an office without a table and chair. Only a short uncomfortable sofa and a small soft cube with a monitor with the camera. There was no space to put my laptop so it did not obscure the camera (one of the interviews was still remote) , keyboard and mouse. I could not sit properly, had to squat, no place to put your legs comfortably or arms. Basically they test if you can program while doing yoga.
4. For the systems interviews, they asked questions that had no connection with the job requirements, job description, and my resume, and expected good domain knowledge, not just attempts to solve.
5. For the systems interviews, the interviewers spoke with a heavy Chinese accent and I could understand them. Additionally, they interrupted me very often with complaints (which were uncomprehensible because of Chinese accent).
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
When Google first started, you would type in the search phrase and get the results. But now, when you start typing, Google gives you auto-completion suggestions for your query. Design such a system.
(Has nothing to do with the job description, requirements, and I have never done anything like that, and the interviewer expected not just good effort, but actual knowledge of how such a system is done, with billions of users doing billions of queries at the same time around the world).