I applied online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Meta (Palo Alto, CA) in Jul 2011
Interview
Phone screen, Excel test, phone interview, skype interviews, 30 page assignment, flew out for on-site interviews, more phone interviews, flew out again for on-site interviews.
They put me through the ringer before they hired me. But the questions were relevant and the people I met were great. This was back in their Palo Alto offices though.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Pre-IPO, they asked me to write a paper on the valuation of Facebook. They also asked me what I thought the greatest technological advancement was in the past 20 years.
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.
