I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Palo Alto, CA) in Dec 2011
Interview
A recruiter contacted me after a mutual friend gave them my resume. They were aware that I had a pending offer that I had to make a decision on, and were very good about moving the process along as quickly as possible.
I lived nearby, so I did two on-site interviews initially. After completely bombing one of them but doing well on the other I was brought in a little bit later for the full interview. I had about 5 people interview me. Afterwards they were still unsure so I had a couple phone interviews/conversations.
The recruiter did a great job of keeping me up-to-date about what was happening, was very honest with me, and was able to rush to get me an offer (which was especially nice because it was almost Christmas at the time)
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Many of the interviews focus on coding exercises. It can be very hard to write code on a whiteboard with someone watching you. People are right about it being a good idea to practice writing on a whiteboard on your own first.
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.
Standard cookie cutter interview with a coding interview, a system design interview and culture interview. The coding part is basically leetcode. The system design is what you can find on many youtube videos. The culture one is more tricky as they want to see that you fit Meta's culture, not that you were doing great at your existing company. So skills like dealing with conflict without calling in managers is sought after.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
coding: I forgot, sorry
system design: design ticketmaster
culture: talk about past project; when you disagreed with a peer; how I resolved dissagreements, etc.
The interview felt more straightforward than I anticipated for a well-known tech giant. After a recruiter screen, I faced a technical round that included a DSA question about finding the lowest common ancestor in a binary tree. I was pleasantly surprised when I realized the exact problem had popped up in the algorithm practice section on PracHub during my prep. Ultimately, the experience was decent, but I chose to decline the offer as it didn’t align with my current goals.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a binary tree, find the lowest common ancestor of two given nodes in the tree.
