I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Palo Alto, CA) in Sept 2008
Interview
I applied online through the Facebook website and heard back from HR within 2 weeks. After speaking with the recruiter, we setup a phone interview with one of the engineers. The phone interview was about 20 minutes long and consisted of 2 questions which were algorithmic in nature, one of which was reversing a linked list. I heard back from them about a week later and we setup a time for an on-site interview. I was alotted $1000USD for travel expenses to travel from Toronto, ON to Palo Alto, CA. The on-site interview lasted 4 hours and was split up into 1 hour interviews with a different engineer. The questions were mostly abstract, and language independent. Content of the questions varied from riddles to database design. My impression of the first three engineers was good, they seemed like nice guys, and knowledgeable. The last interviewer came off as pretentious, I felt as though he wanted me to fail -- just my opinion!
Overall, the office culture seemed relaxed and the problems they are solving there are interesting ones. I'd recommend interviewing with them if only for the chance to visit Palo Alto!
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
You have two lightbulbs and a 100-storey building. You want to find the floor at which the bulbs will break when dropped. Find the floor using the least number of drops.
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.
Standard cookie cutter interview with a coding interview, a system design interview and culture interview. The coding part is basically leetcode. The system design is what you can find on many youtube videos. The culture one is more tricky as they want to see that you fit Meta's culture, not that you were doing great at your existing company. So skills like dealing with conflict without calling in managers is sought after.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
coding: I forgot, sorry
system design: design ticketmaster
culture: talk about past project; when you disagreed with a peer; how I resolved dissagreements, etc.
The interview felt more straightforward than I anticipated for a well-known tech giant. After a recruiter screen, I faced a technical round that included a DSA question about finding the lowest common ancestor in a binary tree. I was pleasantly surprised when I realized the exact problem had popped up in the algorithm practice section on PracHub during my prep. Ultimately, the experience was decent, but I chose to decline the offer as it didn’t align with my current goals.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a binary tree, find the lowest common ancestor of two given nodes in the tree.
