I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Phoenix, AZ) in Feb 2015
Interview
I applied through a referral, 1 Skype interview (2 were scheduled but I didn't make it past the first one). The interviewer briefly introduced himself and asked me a coding question straight away. I chose to use Java. No behavioral questions, just 1 coding question. Contrary to what most people have said, I got an interviewer who wasn't very friendly. He was there to do his job. Plain and simple.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Before I get to the question I just want to say that the interviewer had a very thick accent (I'm an international candidate, BTW), and that made it really difficult for me to understand what he wanted me to do. This isn't me being bitter. I'm saying this so that I present a very honest opinion about my interview.
That being said, the question wasn't something that can be found online or in most books, I was given 2 functions String recv() and String ReadLine() [ both these DO NOT take arguments]. recv() generates some string (Example:"123\n45\n6789"). ReadLine() should read the string being returned by recv() and print all characters until the first \n. After that it should read the recv() string again and print the next characters until the 2nd \n.
Example: recv(): "123\n45\n6789"
ReadLine(): "123" //first call of ReadLine
ReadLine(): "45" // second call of ReadLine
However, the next sequence now doesn't have a \n. So, once the end of the string is hit, the ReadLine() function must call recv() again, and append all characters until it reads a \n.
Continuing the above example: ReadLine():6789abcde //Third call of ReadLine
recv():"abc"// still no \n...so you must call recv() again
recv():"de\n"
The commented sections are my explanations (the interviewer didn't give any such things). I've explained the problem as clearly as I can. Unfortunately, the interviewer kept overwriting his examples, and (I have to emphasize this) his accent made it really hard to understand just what he wanted out of this program.
Overall, the process took a little over two weeks, which felt a bit longer than I anticipated. After a quick screening, I went through two technical rounds focusing on coding and DSA concepts. One of the questions was a classic palindrome check; mid-way through, I realized it was something I had practiced on PracHub just days earlier. The final step was a casual behavioral interview. I was relieved to get an offer shortly after, which I happily accepted.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a string, determine if it is a valid palindrome considering only alphanumeric characters and ignoring case.
I applied online. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA)
Interview
It's honestly striaght from leetcode tagged
There are no surprises if you do tagged you would be good and do well.
System design is much harder. Would recommend using hello interview.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design Twitter and consider if it was suddenly an extremely low latency env
Grateful doesn't even begin to describe how I feel about landing this role. The interview loop was smooth and friendly. They kicked things off with a technical round where I faced a DSA question about verifying an alien dictionary. Lucky for me, the time I'd spent on PracHub paid off, as it had the same type of problem just days before. After that, I had a system design discussion and a behavioral interview. Everything felt very collaborative, and by the end, I received an offer that I was thrilled to accept.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a list of words written in an alien language and the order of letters in that language's alphabet, determine whether the words are sorted lexicographically (Verifying an Alien Dictionary). Walk through the comparison approach using a character-to-index map, the O(C) time complexity where C is total characters, and how you'd extend it to handle words with mixed-case letters or words containing characters outside the given alphabet.