The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Meta (Palo Alto, CA) in Jul 2011
Interview
Was referred by an employee and then contacted by an HR. Had 3 rounds of phone interviews and then was called for onsite interviews. The questions were aimed at testing coding and design skills. They are looking for people who can write the correct code at the first go. So my advice would be that you revise all the basic algorithms, look at the common interview questions and practice a lot of coding on paper/whiteboard. The level of questions was not as difficult as Google.
Interview questions [5]
Question 1
Implement a function
char* readLine();
which returns single lines from a buffer. To read the buffer, you can makes use of a function
int read(char* buf, int len)
which fills buf with upto len chars and returns the actual number of chars filled in. Function readLine can be called as many times as desired. If there is no valid data or newline terminated string available, it must block. In order to block, it can use read function which in turn will block when it doesn't have anything to fill the buf.
Implement a function string balanceParanthesis(string s); which given a string s consisting of some parenthesis returns a string s1 in which parenthesis are balanced and differences between s and s1 are minimum.
Eg - "(ab(xy)u)2)" -> "(ab(xy)u)2"
")))(((" -> ""
How will you design facebook newsfeed. Focus was on a design which could handle the huge number of status updates and display them on each of the user's friend's wall.
Took about a month from start to finish, which felt longer than I expected. After a couple of initial phone screenings, I faced a challenging technical round focused on system design. It was during this round that I was asked to describe overcoming a major career challenge. Interestingly, I had just reviewed a similar framework on PracHub, which helped me articulate my thoughts clearly. Overall, I appreciated the depth of the process and ended up accepting the offer.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Describe Overcoming a Major Challenge in Your Career
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
Unexpectedly, the first question in the technical round felt familiar. It was about finding a subset of strings with unique character concatenation — same problem I had worked through on PracHub a few days earlier. The interview included a recruiter screen followed by a rigorous pair of technical interviews where I tackled data structures and algorithms alongside system design concepts. After successfully answering a few more challenging DSA questions, I received an offer. The entire experience was intense but ultimately rewarding, and I happily accepted the position.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given an array of strings, pick a subset whose concatenation contains no duplicate characters, and return the maximum possible length of that concatenation.
