I applied online. The process took 6 months. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Nov 2012
Interview
Had brief phone conversation with interviewer initially, who scheduled a technical interview with an engineer working at Facebook HQ.
The second technical interview was fairly relaxed, I was asked to solve two problems using collabedit.com, firstly, finding all the anagrams in an array of strings, secondly, finding the number of ways a given score could be reached for a game with 3 different ways of scoring (e.g. 3, 5 and 10 points).
After the phone interview I was offered an onsite interview in at Menlo Park (travel expenses paid for). The interview day involved 4 back to back interviews with different engineers. The questions varied in complexity and required answers to be given on a white board. Those I can remember was implementing combinations(n, k), printing a binary tree L-R, and implementing a comparator function to sort files based on a certain naming convention.
I found it difficult to make any personal connections with my interviewers, they all seemed rushed and uninterested in striking up conversation - it was not an enjoyable experience. Indeed, my first interviewer was clearly more interested in what he was working on as he arrived ~20minutes late.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Providing an algorithm for combinations(n, k), not because of it's complexity, just because it took my the majority of the interview to understand that this was the problem I was solving - it was not made very clear at all.
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.
