I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Meta in Sept 2010
Interview
I was contacted by the Facebook recruiter saying I need to solve one of the puzzle from the Facebook puzzles to start the interview process. I had solved one problem and then recruiter scheduled my phone interview.
The interview was good. The guy at the other end was nice and smart. The interview last for around 1 hr. It start by asking me about myself. He asked me about my choice between three platforms (linux kernel, MySql, JAVA script). I had chosen Mysql and he asked me why did I choose MySql. Other questions are described below.
I got response from the recruiter that they would like to keep me on hold, as they are finding difficulty in judging with large number of candidates.
I answered all questions correctly (I feel) except my written code (took around 10 to 15 mins) for the problem had one bug which he had noticed correctly and told me to resolve it. After resolving it he gave me the green signal.
One of the big problem (I guess one of the main factor in the interview) I faced that as I am OK with English, I was finding difficulty in understanding his accent. So many times the interviewer had to repeat his questions.
Lastly he asked me if I have any questions for them. I asked one question.
This is how end my phone interview with Facebook.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
You are going to take some numbers as an input from a file. You need to witer a program to find longest increasing sequence. You should process it as soon as you are taking an input. After finishing the last input immediately you should be able to tell the sequence.
Input: 1 5 3 4 6 4
Output: 3 4 6
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.
