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).
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Oct 2012
Interview
I was cold-called by a recruiter and offered a technical interview. I scheduled the interview, but in the meantime, I received an offer from another company, and canceled the interview.
Later, I decided to re-apply for the same position and the process continued where it was left.
I was interviewed by phone and asked to complete a coding assignment. As I discovered later, this assignment appears here as one of the questions.
Later, I was notified I passed the phone screening and was invited for an on-site interview. There was a total of 4 interviews, including three coding interviews. Even though most of the questions appeared on this site, I did not do very well in the coding part, thus, as expected, did not receive the offer.
Throughout the entire process, the hiring staff was extremely helpful and provided lots of information regarding the position, and the interviewing process itself. The recruiter also organized a phone call with on of the engineers to help me learn more about the position I was applying for. While at Menlo Park, I was accompanied by the recruiter and she showed me all around the campus.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
None of the questions were difficult, or unexpected. Most of them appear on this site.
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