I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Meta in Jul 2016
Interview
I was initially contacted by a recruiter and we had an initial discussion about engineering at Facebook and my interests. I was then scheduled for a phone interview.
The phone interview was with an Engineer and he asked 2 pretty standard coding questions, nothing crazy. After the phone interview, I was invited onsite.
The onsite interview consisted of 5 sessions:
* A discussion with the interviewer about my past experience and how I reacted to certain situations ("tell me about a time when" type questions) and a coding question
* 3 coding sessions
* A system design session
I also had lunch with an Engineer and was able to ask additional questions during lunch. Overall, the sessions were well managed. 2 of the coding sessions involved standard coding questions that can be found on various online resources (leetcode, geeks for geeks, etc). The third was a question that I hadn't seen before and that I found challenging. I ran out of time on this particular session.
The system design question was relatively straightforward.
The discussion + coding session threw me for a loop. I had a discussion with the interviewer for most of the session about various situations in the past. Suddenly, he said "ok, we have less than ten minutes left, time to code". It was a little jarring and I had a little bit of a tough time switching gears so suddenly. The question itself wasn't too difficult, but the sudden change caught me off guard and I had some mistakes in my solution.
Overall the interviewers were very nice and respectful. When I had the opportunity to ask questions, it felt like they were hones and sincere in their answers (it didn't feel like unnecessary corporate cheerleading).
After my onsite had concluded, I received an email for feedback on the interview, which was nice. They asked for detailed feedback on the interview and whether or not the folks were on time for the sessions. It seems like Facebook takes their interview process and the feedback seriously (from what I can gather).
In the end, I was not extended an offer, but the overall process was very efficient and smooth.
10
Other Software Engineer interview reviews for Meta
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.
