I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Meta in Dec 2013
Interview
I was first contacted by a recruiter at Facebook. She told me that my background is very impressive and asked me if I would be interested in a software engineer position. I said that I would be excited and she scheduled the next round of interview with a Facebook engineer. It wasn't an on-site interview but a phone screening interview right before one.
The engineer first asked me why I would want to work at Facebook. Then we moved on to two technical questions. The first one was merging two sorted arrays (both length n) in the most efficient way when the latter of the arrays have buffer size 2n.
The second question was writing a function that checks if a tree is a binary search tree. For the second question, I got the right idea of using in-order traversal to check if it is a binary search but couldn't finish the implementation on time. After the interview, I wrote it on a editor myself and was sad to find out that it was not that complex at all.
Anyway I am still waiting for a reply and I hope I could proceed to on-site interview. :)
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Oct 2013
Interview
I uploaded my CV in their system and got contacted by a recruiter. In the initial phone screen we discussed my interests and strength and the recruiter got back to me about a group that sounded like a good fit.
Since I was local I did the first technical interview directly on site. It took about 45min. My interviewer was not directly associated with the group that I talked about with the recruiter. But he did take my background into account when asking questions.
It went pretty well and a couple of days later, they invited me back for a full day of interviews.
The full day interviews were mostly general coding questions and one architecture session.
Although this time, I was talking directly to the people from the group were I saw a fit with my background and interests, unfortunately the interviewers did not ask any related questions. They kept strictly to (I guess) Facebook approved coding questions. Those were very low level and I did only perform moderately well I think.
The architecture session went much better and was almost related to my background.
After the full day of interviews it was pretty clear that this was not a good fit. They confirmed that a couple of days later and the interview process stopped there.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I think the most difficult part were not the coding question itself but that they were the kind of questions where you have to be recall a lot from basic computer science classes. Things you tend to forget if you have already been working for a couple of years. But then again, that was not necessarily unexpected.