I applied online. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at Meta (San Jose, CA) in Sep 2015
Interview
I applied to Facebook through their website and got a call from the recruiter the next day. He asked the standard screening questions and set up a technical phone screen for later that week.
The phone screen was done using coderpad.io, and they threw me off from the very beginning by setting up a C++ environment although I had told the recruiter that I was most comfortable in Python and although I never claimed anywhere that I had any familiarity with C++. Still, interview questions tend to be general enough that, as long as you aren't completely unfamiliar with the language syntax, you can generally do a decent job in any language. So off we went in C++.
The interviewer was very pleasant, and even gave me some tips for how to improve my resume at the beginning. Then we dived into the coding. He had actually chosen a great question to determine my programming ability. Unfortunately, I botched it by making too many assumptions about the question and not considering carefully enough what lay behind the interface that the interviewer had provided me.
This all happened maybe two or three weeks ago and I am sure that I won't be progressing to the next step. The one negative in all this is that the recruiter has not followed up at all with me. Yes, rejection is not uncommon when applying at a company like Facebook, but that doesn't mean that the company shouldn't have the courtesy to at least inform you of it.
So overall, great experience in the beginning but I was turned off by the lack of respect for the process that I sensed from the recruiter.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a buffer-like interface from which you can only read data in chunks of a fixed size, implement a reader which can read as many bytes as it wants from this interface.
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