The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in May 2016
Interview
I had one phone interview + 4 on-site interviews: 2 coding, 1 cultural + coding, 1 system design.
My experience suggests that I should have not waste my time with Facebook. It seems that they just interview with people without giving them offer. I had a perfect day at my on-site interview. I heard a few others were like me as well. None of us got an offer. In my case, two of the interviewers were really surprised with my answers and I finished 15 minutes before the time goes up and we chat the rest of the time. One of the interviewers told me that she believes Facebook should hire less people to have enough challenges for the current employees. Recruiters at Facebook are also terrible. They respond to your emails with template answers and unfortunately have very low technical knowledge.
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
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.
