I applied through a recruiter. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Mar 2013
Interview
I was contacted by the recruiter who found me via graph search, and was asked whether I was job hunting. I chose to go onsite for the initial phone screen. The question was straightforward with emphasis on fast and accurate coding, and the interviewer was very knowledgeable.
A few days after the screen the recruiter scheduled an on-site with me, and the dates were quite flexible. The on-site consisted of four interviews, 3 pure coding (of which one is about design) and 1 research interview (I guess this is for all PhD applicants). I was quite happy with the coding ones but the research one was, well, a little annoying since the interviewer seemed to be dismissive to everything. But overall, it was a nice experience, two interviews plus lunch + tour around plus two in the afternoon, and it was done!
I did wait for 3 weeks till the decision was make, and during the period the HR seems to be a little nonresponsive. When I followed up what I received was something like a one line email saying "we are reviewing your case and will come back to you soon". This was a little annoying especially the feeling of being silently rejected started to grow, but I guess it is not the HR's fault anyway.
In the end I was offered a job with flexible titles - software engineer or research scientist or whatever. I decided not to take the offer in the end, but the interview process was very smooth.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Signed NDA, so maybe it's not OK to disclose the questions... It was standard coding questions, not those hard ones at leetcode, but you need to make sure not to make silly mistakes. Missing a few semicolons is file, though.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Apr 2013
Interview
I was contacted on 25 February via LinkedIn following a recommendation. The position was in the Mobile Operations team. It was followed by a series of phone interviews:
- one with the technical sourcer
- one with the head of the team
- two more with some specialists in various departments
Following the phone interviews, was an onsite interview in Menlo Park on 22 April. Given the 10 hrs time zone difference, they were sympathetic with the jet lag and flew me there on Saturday for the Monday interviews. The interview day had five sessions:
- one with the head of the team
- one with guys from the team (codding session)
- one with a guy from management
- two more with guys from other departments (systems and networking)
With the exception of codding interview, where a second guy was there to observe, all other interviews were 1:1
I flew out on Tuesday, and on Thursday I received a call that they were happy with my performance and we can move forward.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I expected a tirade of technical questions. The unexpected part was that the interview was both ways: they interviewed me, I interviewed them. Most parts were more like brainstorming session than exams.
The most difficult question was when a guy showed me a gdb stack trace of the threads within a process which hung. It was an facebook internal application, so I had no previous knowledge of that application. The question was what went wrong. Luckily, it was a clear situation where all threads were waiting for a blocked thread.
2 Phone interviews + 3 Onsite interviews
Phone interview questions: Sort a array containing values 0,1 or 2
Find 3 values from an array whose sum is 0.