I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Sep 2013
Interview
Facebook really needs to change their interviewing process. It's horrid.
No matter how much experience you have, you won't be asked a single thing about your resume. In fact, nobody will even bring a copy to the interview. I found this disappointing because I have over 10 years of experience at previous companies. I could have been a bumbling idiot at other companies and they would never know.
The Product Manager to Developer ratio is insane. For the group that I talked to there were 5-6 product managers for 200 developers. This 1:40 ratio basically means that product managers are rare unicorns and you won't get a job offer. In fact, look through the product manager interview feedback here and you won't see a single "offer declined" posting.
You will be asked a bunch of quant questions instead. In one interview that I had, the interviewer didn't introduce himself at all and we did 4 case questions in a row over 45 minutes including "How would you determine how to rank posts in the news feed", "How would you determine the negative value of an abusive posting", "How would you calculate the number of daily registrations that Facebook has". They're good questions but wow it's a ton of work.
By far the worst interview questions that I've ever gotten came up with 2 different interviewers here. I'm actually sorry that I didn't do more research online before the interview because these questions are the most easily prepared for. I could have memorized the answers ahead of time. Question was "Pick an industry that will be different in 10 years and how can Facebook be a part of that". It's pretty difficult to be that creative on the spot. I wish I gave the question an hour of thought before coming to the interview.
I was disappointed with the quality of people that I interviewed with considering that Facebook is one of the more recognized names in the business. Product Managers frequently had just 2-3 years of experience.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Pick an industry that will be different in 10 years and how can Facebook be a part of that.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Meta in Jun 2013
Interview
I was introduced to a technical recruiter while I was visiting a friend at the Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park. I received a preliminary email to set up a screening call two days later. The screening call was 45 mins long and focused on my background and previous experience. The recruiter was very polite and efficient. At the end of the interview the recruiter asked me to send her my availabilities for a preliminary phone interview.
The initial phone interview was setup for two weeks later and involved 2, 45-minute interviews with two different Facebook product managers. The recruiter called me a couple of hours before to tell me the first interview was to focus on "vision" and the second to focus on "analytics".
The product managers I spoke to were both polite and quite efficient. After some pleasantries we got into the first real question which was "Choose a technology you are particularly excited about and why". Then the interviewer asked me to talk about the disadvantages of the new technology and it's potential negative effects. The third question was about how this new technology could be integrated into a Facebook product. This part was tricky because I had chose a technology that would be difficult to integrate into Facebook products given their challenges with privacy issues. I felt the interview when well and I was confident in my answers but I would like to have chosen a technology that was a more natural fit with Facebook's current products.
The second phone interview took place right after the first and focused on analytics. "You are the PM of the Facebook timeline - how would you measure retention?". My background is with small startups and I could tell right away that the interviewer didn't like my answers as he kept asking the same question in a different way. I felt that I answered the questions well but the interview ended 5 mins early and I was not asked for a follow up on-site interview.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
You are the PM of the Facebook timeline - how would you measure retention?