I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Meta in Mar 2011
Interview
Recruiter contacted me, reasonably quickly [within a week] after applying online and was generally very helpful.
But the first interviewer started phone interview around 10 minutes late [in the end ending up kicked out of conf. room] and asked two very simple questions. One of the questions was given 2 arrays of size n and 2n containing n elements only, both sorted in ascending order, How will you merge, first array with second [which has size 2n] into second array in ascending order. I just used merge sort merge step and wrote java like psuedo code in collabedit.
I tried out my code later and it worked fine with no changes [except that I used .length() instead of .length for array length]. But he didn't provide any feedback on what he was looking for. It was correct and complexity was the best possible. One thing I can think of later was I didn't add any method level comments [although I had comments in body] as it was pseudo code. Maybe he was looking for it [pure guess - as I don't know what he wanted]. I left with impression of having done the interview very well [I have worked in the best of companies and got interviewed and interview for those companies] and most of the time you know when you blew it.
But I was surprised to get the rejection, 2 days later! Particularly given that question was too easy! Now I am left pondering over what was it? I consider interviews where the perception of interviewer and interviewee differs wildly in terms of performance as bad interviews with negative experience associated with it, as the interviewer didn't communicate his intention with the interviewee properly. If he was not looking for correctness and perf. [objectively defined as mentioned above], What was it?
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given sorted arrays of length n and 2n with n elements each, merge first array into second array.
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.
