I applied online. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at Meta (San Jose, CA) in Sep 2015
Interview
I applied to Facebook through their website and got a call from the recruiter the next day. He asked the standard screening questions and set up a technical phone screen for later that week.
The phone screen was done using coderpad.io, and they threw me off from the very beginning by setting up a C++ environment although I had told the recruiter that I was most comfortable in Python and although I never claimed anywhere that I had any familiarity with C++. Still, interview questions tend to be general enough that, as long as you aren't completely unfamiliar with the language syntax, you can generally do a decent job in any language. So off we went in C++.
The interviewer was very pleasant, and even gave me some tips for how to improve my resume at the beginning. Then we dived into the coding. He had actually chosen a great question to determine my programming ability. Unfortunately, I botched it by making too many assumptions about the question and not considering carefully enough what lay behind the interface that the interviewer had provided me.
This all happened maybe two or three weeks ago and I am sure that I won't be progressing to the next step. The one negative in all this is that the recruiter has not followed up at all with me. Yes, rejection is not uncommon when applying at a company like Facebook, but that doesn't mean that the company shouldn't have the courtesy to at least inform you of it.
So overall, great experience in the beginning but I was turned off by the lack of respect for the process that I sensed from the recruiter.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a buffer-like interface from which you can only read data in chunks of a fixed size, implement a reader which can read as many bytes as it wants from this interface.
Took about a month altogether, which felt longer given the intensity of the process. Kicked off with a technical screening, followed by two rigorous coding interviews. The DSA question on binary tree vertical order traversal hit me hard at first, but then I recognized the prompt instantly — I had just worked through something similar on PracHub. The final round was focused on system design, and while I ended up receiving an offer, I ultimately declined it. Overall, a challenging experience that definitely sharpened my skills.
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.