I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Oct 2013
Interview
I uploaded my CV in their system and got contacted by a recruiter. In the initial phone screen we discussed my interests and strength and the recruiter got back to me about a group that sounded like a good fit.
Since I was local I did the first technical interview directly on site. It took about 45min. My interviewer was not directly associated with the group that I talked about with the recruiter. But he did take my background into account when asking questions.
It went pretty well and a couple of days later, they invited me back for a full day of interviews.
The full day interviews were mostly general coding questions and one architecture session.
Although this time, I was talking directly to the people from the group were I saw a fit with my background and interests, unfortunately the interviewers did not ask any related questions. They kept strictly to (I guess) Facebook approved coding questions. Those were very low level and I did only perform moderately well I think.
The architecture session went much better and was almost related to my background.
After the full day of interviews it was pretty clear that this was not a good fit. They confirmed that a couple of days later and the interview process stopped there.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I think the most difficult part were not the coding question itself but that they were the kind of questions where you have to be recall a lot from basic computer science classes. Things you tend to forget if you have already been working for a couple of years. But then again, that was not necessarily unexpected.
Unexpectedly, the first question in the technical round felt familiar. It was about finding a subset of strings with unique character concatenation — same problem I had worked through on PracHub a few days earlier. The interview included a recruiter screen followed by a rigorous pair of technical interviews where I tackled data structures and algorithms alongside system design concepts. After successfully answering a few more challenging DSA questions, I received an offer. The entire experience was intense but ultimately rewarding, and I happily accepted the position.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given an array of strings, pick a subset whose concatenation contains no duplicate characters, and return the maximum possible length of that concatenation.
Standard cookie cutter interview with a coding interview, a system design interview and culture interview. The coding part is basically leetcode. The system design is what you can find on many youtube videos. The culture one is more tricky as they want to see that you fit Meta's culture, not that you were doing great at your existing company. So skills like dealing with conflict without calling in managers is sought after.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
coding: I forgot, sorry
system design: design ticketmaster
culture: talk about past project; when you disagreed with a peer; how I resolved dissagreements, etc.
The interview felt more straightforward than I anticipated for a well-known tech giant. After a recruiter screen, I faced a technical round that included a DSA question about finding the lowest common ancestor in a binary tree. I was pleasantly surprised when I realized the exact problem had popped up in the algorithm practice section on PracHub during my prep. Ultimately, the experience was decent, but I chose to decline the offer as it didn’t align with my current goals.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a binary tree, find the lowest common ancestor of two given nodes in the tree.