I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Meta in Jun 2012
Interview
I got contacted by an HR. After some email traffic, I got a skype call with HR to discuss the interview process.
I solved a puzzle at interviewstreet and they set up an appointment with the engineer at California.
Technical Phone interview lasted 30 mins. Interviewer was friendly but he immediately asked for live coding (in 6-7 mins). And because of he is Indian, it was very difficult to understand him as a not native English speaker.
He asked for a technical question, wanted to optimize code, and then told me the interview is over.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
You have a file consists of billions of records.
It cannot fit into memory, so you need to reverse every word in that file and save to another file.
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
