I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at Meta in Sep 2013
Interview
Recruiter contacted on LinkedIn. Set up phone screen for a few days later, which consisted of basic behavioral questions and some technical questions (basically questions passed to the recruiters by engineering to weed out super weak candidates). Then a technical phone screen with an engineer. First a basic coding question. Second question was a weird one. It was basically a language specific question related to how to modify the default behavior of a certain class. I spent the rest and a long portion of the interview trying to understand what exactly needed to be done and couldn't come up with a solution at all. Then I asked the interviewer how what he was asking could be achieved and he told me about a similar class that would provide that capability. Since I had no idea about that class (and there's really no reason for anyone to know it off top of their heads), I wasted a lot of time trying to solve something that I could have never solved. This was akin to a trick question and obviously very flawed to ask to a software engineer to assess any analytical skills whatsoever. Then chit chatted with the engineer about Facebook but it was obvious that neither side wanted to engage in anymore conversation. Got a rejection email from the recruiter I believe a couple days later.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
A seemingly analytical coding question which couldn't be solved at all if you didn't know a certain class.
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
