I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in May 2012
Interview
First step is one or two phone screens, then a half-day or more of on-site interviews. Focus is on programming and architecture talent, but they're also looking for a good cultural fit. An important thing is that you may be interviewed targeted for a specific function, or for general engineering qualifications. In any case, after boojtcamp, you will be shopped around to all the groups that are looking for people, and you get to call your shot, so you don't have to have your specific career path chosen before you apply.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Most challenging question was an exercise in designing a system to do spam detection work and describing it in a huge flowchart, as might be done in an early but detailed product planning session. Be prepared to think on large scales.
Got a referral through a friend who worked at Meta, which sped up the entire process. After a casual initial chat, I went through a technical interview where I faced a DSA question about validating palindromes. The interviewer was friendly but rigorous. During prep, I had spent time with the coding challenges on PracHub, and it was funny to see a similar palindrome question pop up. Overall, I received an offer, but ultimately decided to decline it after careful consideration.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a string s, return true if it can be a palindrome after deleting at most one character (Valid Palindrome II).
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