I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Meta (Palo Alto, CA) in Oct 2010
Interview
I had on campus interviews in the spring and then decided to interview for full time in the fall. I had three interviews - the first went very well, the second was terrible, the third was alright. The terrible interviewer asked some basic technical questions involving writing code on the board. As I thought out loud, I asked the interviewer clarification questions and then ultimately asked whether I should start writing code on the board. The interviewer either did not respond to my questions or mumbled off a few incomprehensible words. I started writing code and as soon as I stepped back from the board, the interviewer pointed out my mistake without giving me a chance to assess the code myself. He did this an another two times for the subsequent questions.
Overall, the questions were not difficult at all. It seems that Facebook wants to make sure that you code frequently enough that you do not make any errors on your first hack at a problem. This seems to fit the "go fast and break things" motto. Although things didn't work out for me, I got an offer from Google, so I guess that's not a bad second choice.
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.
