I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Apr 2013
Interview
I was contacted on 25 February via LinkedIn following a recommendation. The position was in the Mobile Operations team. It was followed by a series of phone interviews:
- one with the technical sourcer
- one with the head of the team
- two more with some specialists in various departments
Following the phone interviews, was an onsite interview in Menlo Park on 22 April. Given the 10 hrs time zone difference, they were sympathetic with the jet lag and flew me there on Saturday for the Monday interviews. The interview day had five sessions:
- one with the head of the team
- one with guys from the team (codding session)
- one with a guy from management
- two more with guys from other departments (systems and networking)
With the exception of codding interview, where a second guy was there to observe, all other interviews were 1:1
I flew out on Tuesday, and on Thursday I received a call that they were happy with my performance and we can move forward.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I expected a tirade of technical questions. The unexpected part was that the interview was both ways: they interviewed me, I interviewed them. Most parts were more like brainstorming session than exams.
The most difficult question was when a guy showed me a gdb stack trace of the threads within a process which hung. It was an facebook internal application, so I had no previous knowledge of that application. The question was what went wrong. Luckily, it was a clear situation where all threads were waiting for a blocked thread.
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
