I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Meta in Dec 2013
Interview
I was first contacted by a recruiter at Facebook. She told me that my background is very impressive and asked me if I would be interested in a software engineer position. I said that I would be excited and she scheduled the next round of interview with a Facebook engineer. It wasn't an on-site interview but a phone screening interview right before one.
The engineer first asked me why I would want to work at Facebook. Then we moved on to two technical questions. The first one was merging two sorted arrays (both length n) in the most efficient way when the latter of the arrays have buffer size 2n.
The second question was writing a function that checks if a tree is a binary search tree. For the second question, I got the right idea of using in-order traversal to check if it is a binary search but couldn't finish the implementation on time. After the interview, I wrote it on a editor myself and was sad to find out that it was not that complex at all.
Anyway I am still waiting for a reply and I hope I could proceed to on-site interview. :)
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Other Software Engineer interview reviews for Meta
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