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      Software Engineer Interview

      6 Dec 2013
      Anonymous interview candidate
      Menlo Park, CA
      No offer
      Positive experience
      Difficult interview

      Application

      I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Nov 2013

      Interview

      This was for a position in their Infrastructure team in Cambridge MA. Recruiter contacted me in September and was very interested in my background and experience with highly scalable systems - both in Finance and Mobile phone payments. I attended some small intimate presentations they did as they were initially opening a new Boston office and wanted to grow it out. The meetings were great and I learned a lot about how they solve some of their biggest problems. I then did a screening interview on-site (because I don't do technical screens well on the phone). The question was "Given a binary tree, write code to print the tree out line by line". I did OK and got the Breadth First Search down fine, but couldn't figure out the - line-by-line part. (Turns out this is Facebook's #1 question to ask in interviews). Although my performance wasn't great they gave me a break on that and asked me back for another screening interview. This time I prepared well for another coding interview but it turned out to be a Design interview. The problem was "Imagine you have 10,000 servers and need to monitor the performance of each one, how would you do it" - naturally you need to be able to NOT take too much of the bandwidth and so you'll have to do sampling, have some history to watch for trends etc. I passed that and was very excited to be flown out to Menlo Park for the final round. I studied like CRAZY based on questions on this site and CareerCup. I took 4 weeks and studied about 15 hours per week. Turns out I focused on the wrong questions - I studied Tree, String, Array and List algorithms based on the distribution of Q&A but I was asked Binary math and heap algorithms. Here are the questions I was asked. 1) How would you implement division without +, - or multiplication (a "classic" question, but not one of the ones I would focus on). I bombed on this as I was not expecting and could not recall my binary math. I figured out the high level outline but that was all. That I was asked this in the "culture fit" interview made this doubly unexpected. 2) Given 10,000 servers containing a Billion integers each how would you find how to find the median? I knew the answer to this question (use two heaps) - not because I had focused on it, but I had found it an interesting question while studying. However he then asked "How much memory do you need?" and I didn't know how big the heaps would need to be. The real answer I was trying to get is - what is the minimum heap you need. I had a guess but I think I got this wrong. 3) Given a List structure where each node contains a Next node and optionally a pointer to another list, flatten that list e.g. L1 --> L2 --> L3 --> L7 --> L8 | v L4 --> L5-->L6 WIll be flattened to L1 --> L2 --> L3 -->L4 -->L5-->L6-->L7-->L8 I did OK on this - getting the answer - but it appeared I took too long. The interviewer also interrupted me a lot while I was writing an initial solution and that threw me off - I like to be more iterative in my problem solving but I think he expected 100% immediate correctness. He had an observer there too and that guy looked bored out of his mind and that bugged me a little too as it wasn't clear who would be doing the judging. 4) I was also handed some hard to read Python code (I don't know Python) and asked to figure out what it does. I did OK on this - but again surprised to be handed hard-to-read code in a language I didn't know. 5) One final question "How would you implement the "ls" Unix function in your language of choice. It should take the input: >ls a/b/c/*/e/*/f/*/*/g and the output should be similar the the output given by unix." I used a tree structure to represent the file directory structure and wrote a solution from there. I did OK on this. Overall: Everyone seemed very nice - I had a nice lunch and the campus is interesting but it was clear that what I studied was not what I needed to (so lesson learned: don't just trust the distribution of questions on Glassdoor or CareerCup). I even got to walk past Zuckerberg's office (more of a conference room) and saw Sheryl Sandberg in there. One interesting thing I learned is a lot of Google people are leaving for Facebook. Also I'd say if you are over 30 (I am 41) you are a rare bird at Facebook :-) I knew based on the reactions of the interviewers that it was very probably a bust, but overall a good experience and something I will learn from. Very disappointing as I really wanted to be one of the first few Facebook engineers in the Boston area - and to work on their super high scalability issues but such is Life.

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      How would you implement division without +, - or multiplication
      9 Answers
      101

      Other Software Engineer interview reviews for Meta

      Software Engineer Interview

      1 Jun 2026
      Anonymous employee
      Accepted offer
      Positive experience
      Difficult interview

      Application

      I interviewed at Meta

      Interview

      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.
      Answer question

      Software Engineer Interview

      28 May 2026
      Anonymous interview candidate
      Declined offer
      Neutral experience
      Average interview

      Application

      I interviewed at Meta

      Interview

      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.
      Answer question

      Software Engineer Interview

      28 May 2026
      Anonymous interview candidate
      Declined offer
      Neutral experience
      Average interview

      Application

      I interviewed at Meta

      Interview

      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.
      Answer question

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