The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Meta (Palo Alto, CA) in Nov 2009
Interview
I was contacted via email by HR saying that my friend had recommended I be interviewed for a spot at the company. I was pretty surprised by this, but have found that this is how Facebook often goes about doing things. We scheduled an interview for a few days later, which I thought was going to be a technical interview. When I got on the phone with the interview he asked me about what I've been working on recently, and so I got into this whole thing about my research project which I probably took a good 10 - 15 minutes describing. He basically just verbally nodded through the whole thing. He then asked me about what positions I was interested in interviewing for at Facebook. In my push to prepare for what I was expecting to be a technical interview, I somehow neglected to actually figure out what specifically I could work on at Facebook. I mentioned doing something with the large data sets they work on, since my research focused somewhat loosely on large-scale data analysis. Should have prepped for that one, but no problem. He then told me that he'd be happy to set me up for a phone interview with an engineer as soon as possible and I was like "whaa?! I thought you were one!". Not actually, but I did say that I'd be happy to interview with an engineer and so he got that set up for me. I'll come back and post once I've had my *actual* technical interview (instead of just an HR sanity check)
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.
