I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Palo Alto, CA) in Oct 2010
Interview
The rumours about the hiring process being haphazard are true. First a manager phone screened me and asked me to come to Palo Alto. Next the recruiter told me I stll need to go through a phone screen. If the disconnect stopped there it would have been OK. I did not expect to get invited to Palo Alto without a tech screen.
Here's the kicker. I am a senior engineer in my present job. The person who phone screened me was a fresh college hire and had spent about 1 month working at facebook. Facebook was that person's first job. I am not saying a new hire cannot be smarter than a senior person, but it is reasonable to think that it would be a good practice at a big company to allow new hires especially fresh out of school to settle down, understand the needs of the company and then start interviewing people.
You are trying to rob houses on a street. Each house has some +ve amount of cash. Your goal is to rob houses such that you maximize the total robbed amount. The constraint is once you rob a house you cannot rob a house adjascent to that house.
The technical round hit me with a classic array manipulation problem: moving zeroes to the end without disrupting the order of non-zero elements. As I tackled it, I felt a wave of familiarity wash over me; I had just practiced a similar challenge on PracHub. The rest of the interview followed a straightforward path, with some easy behavioral questions sprinkled in. Overall, it felt very easy, but I wasn’t quite the right fit for what they needed, so I didn’t receive an offer.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Move zeroes in an array to the end while keeping non-zero element order, in place
1 leetcode med, 1 leetcode hard. make sure you know your DSA and leetcode questions. I wasn't able to get an offer bc i didnt complete the second question. Got a reply 2 days later saying they would move on
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.