I applied through a recruiter. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Oct 2012
Interview
Recruiter contacted me via LinkedIn. He was super nice when we spoke on the phone during initial technical screening. The questions ranged from MySQL, Hadoop, Operating Systems and networking. After that, he set a coding interview with someone from the team. I was asked to solve a program via scripting. With little struggle (I haven't been a hardcore programmer), I was able to get it done. Next came, a talk with hiring manager. This was another round of hardcore technical screening. We spoke a lot about MySQL and Hadoop infrastructure. I did alright in that, so I was asked for an onsite interview for 4 hours. I met with Director level employee, hiring manager, folks reporting into this position as well as a peer. The questions were related to their operational problems and best way of doing things at facebook scale. Since I have not operated at facebook scale, I just put forward solutions from my viewpoint. That was not good enough for them, so they decided to pass me. Recruiter called me couple of days later with specific feedback which I think is pretty cool. I didn't expect the recruiter to be so thorough in the feedback. In addition, recruiter helped me in every step of the way, so kudos to him. On the other hand, I felt hiring manager didn't know how to interview (he hardly looked at me in 45 minutes I was with him and he apologized for that during the meeting itself).
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How do you account for disk failures in ensuring you lose no data from the hadoop cluster. Asked to come up with a hypothetical configuration (2 racks, n number of disks, 1 copy of data on each rack).