I applied online. The process took 6 months. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Nov 2012
Interview
Had brief phone conversation with interviewer initially, who scheduled a technical interview with an engineer working at Facebook HQ.
The second technical interview was fairly relaxed, I was asked to solve two problems using collabedit.com, firstly, finding all the anagrams in an array of strings, secondly, finding the number of ways a given score could be reached for a game with 3 different ways of scoring (e.g. 3, 5 and 10 points).
After the phone interview I was offered an onsite interview in at Menlo Park (travel expenses paid for). The interview day involved 4 back to back interviews with different engineers. The questions varied in complexity and required answers to be given on a white board. Those I can remember was implementing combinations(n, k), printing a binary tree L-R, and implementing a comparator function to sort files based on a certain naming convention.
I found it difficult to make any personal connections with my interviewers, they all seemed rushed and uninterested in striking up conversation - it was not an enjoyable experience. Indeed, my first interviewer was clearly more interested in what he was working on as he arrived ~20minutes late.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Providing an algorithm for combinations(n, k), not because of it's complexity, just because it took my the majority of the interview to understand that this was the problem I was solving - it was not made very clear at all.
1 leetcode med, 1 leetcode hard. make sure you know your DSA and leetcode questions. I wasn't able to get an offer bc i didnt complete the second question. Got a reply 2 days later saying they would move on
Overall, the process took a little over two weeks, which felt a bit longer than I anticipated. After a quick screening, I went through two technical rounds focusing on coding and DSA concepts. One of the questions was a classic palindrome check; mid-way through, I realized it was something I had practiced on PracHub just days earlier. The final step was a casual behavioral interview. I was relieved to get an offer shortly after, which I happily accepted.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a string, determine if it is a valid palindrome considering only alphanumeric characters and ignoring case.