I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Mar 2014
Interview
Was contacted by a recruiter. Set up a phone interview; had weird telephone problems, couldn't understand my interviewer very well. Did some general algorithm questions in Python that were well-suited to a phone interview, but wasn't pleased with my performance overall.
Recruiter contacted me back to do a second phone screen - said there "wasn't enough of a signal" the first time. Apparently this is not common. Second phone screen had problems with the collaborative edit software we used for coding - I had to stop, copy, and repaste my code several times for some reason. Again, the questions were well-suited to the format of the interview. Thought I did better but no better than an average performance, probably.
No offer, the whole process took about a month (but I intentionally delayed the phone screen for personal reasons).
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I was asked the 3-sum problem. Basically, given an array of integers, find three that sum to a given value. Alternately, find all triplets that sum to the given value.
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
