I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Feb 2013
Interview
My application was submitted through an internal referral, and I was contacted by the recruiter within a week. The recruiter was very helpful in providing tips on preparing the interview and the format of the interview.
Even though I didn't get an offer, the overall interview process was very pleasant. Each interviewer is assigned to test on one or two specific skill set of yours. All the coding and design questions are fair interview questions, and the interviewers were all pretty friendly.
I had an additional "practice" interview to prepare an interviewer to learn how to interview. Also, most of the interviews had a shadow interviewer, but this seems to be the norm for all the companies I interviewed.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
My interview with a manager, he asked me a real internal problem they have and asked me to propose a solution. The question is really interesting, but I feel it's a bit hard for an outsider to give an answer that's effective and not overly complicated
Recruiter call was pretty standard, first round was 2 Meta tagged LC mediums in 45 minutes. On-site was 2 coding sessions of 2 LC mediums, a system design interview and a behavioral interview with an engineering manager.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How do you answer if someone asks how long a deliverable or project will take?
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.
