I applied through a recruiter. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at Meta (Seattle, WA) in Mar 2016
Interview
Initial phone screen from Human Resources. He followed up after an application 5 years ago or so. He did a quick phone screen and forwarded an overwhelming number of resources to help with the interview process. This included live meetings with Gayle Laakmann McDowell with help on technical interviews. I've never been more prepared by a recruiter and probably never will be again. Ironically, this is one of the cases where I needed it the least. It really just wasn't as technically challenging as interviews at Google or Microsoft.
He then followed up and was super flexible on the phone screen which I opted to do in person. It's on the candidates schedule and terms. Very accommodating. During the in-person initial screen, the recruiter again offered tons of preparation and "pep talk." He did say not to rush and to take my time, which is definitely a tendency of mine. Don't listen to that advice, though. My adherence to this advice was ultimately cited as the reason for my rejection (my slow deliberation was interpreted as "struggling"). But otherwise, it was extremely helpful and really great.
The interviewer I was scheduled with was out sick so I got another guy. It was the least adversarial interview of the Google/MS/Amazon style I've ever done. He was helpful and supportive. Very laid back (he was wearing sweat pants and a T-shirt) which really helped.
I really took my time and avoided going into rush-panic like I do, and was only able to get through one question in the allotted time. I answered it and came up with the solution on my first try (very long and deliberate first try), which even my interviewer said he couldn't do during his interview. But at the end of the day, I was rejected anyway.
It showed that it's important not to obsess over the technical preparation. The guy who interviewed me probably was less prepared technically when he interviewed, but he probably did a better job on the soft skills. And he got the job. I worked through on the technical front with no issue, but probably spoke without a sense of confidence and made bad jokes while slowly deliberating through the problem.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
They make you sign an NDA on the way in. But it was a very basic Graph Theory problem disguised in a way that didn't initially look like a Graph Theory problem. Basic Depth First Search, ultimately.
Overall, the process took a little over two weeks, which felt a bit longer than I anticipated. After a quick screening, I went through two technical rounds focusing on coding and DSA concepts. One of the questions was a classic palindrome check; mid-way through, I realized it was something I had practiced on PracHub just days earlier. The final step was a casual behavioral interview. I was relieved to get an offer shortly after, which I happily accepted.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a string, determine if it is a valid palindrome considering only alphanumeric characters and ignoring case.
I applied online. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA)
Interview
It's honestly striaght from leetcode tagged
There are no surprises if you do tagged you would be good and do well.
System design is much harder. Would recommend using hello interview.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design Twitter and consider if it was suddenly an extremely low latency env
Grateful doesn't even begin to describe how I feel about landing this role. The interview loop was smooth and friendly. They kicked things off with a technical round where I faced a DSA question about verifying an alien dictionary. Lucky for me, the time I'd spent on PracHub paid off, as it had the same type of problem just days before. After that, I had a system design discussion and a behavioral interview. Everything felt very collaborative, and by the end, I received an offer that I was thrilled to accept.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a list of words written in an alien language and the order of letters in that language's alphabet, determine whether the words are sorted lexicographically (Verifying an Alien Dictionary). Walk through the comparison approach using a character-to-index map, the O(C) time complexity where C is total characters, and how you'd extend it to handle words with mixed-case letters or words containing characters outside the given alphabet.