I applied through an employee referral. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Mar 2012
Interview
Got the interview referred by an employee. The interview process was very impersonal, with canned e-mail responses and literally no connection between the recruiter and the applicant. The recruiter persistently ignored my questions regarding team assignments. Had only one interview, with the "collaborative" coding question asked within the first 15 seconds of picking up the phone. Poor English skills of the interviewer and unwillingness to provide any hints were extremely unexpected. Despite providing the complete theoretical solution to the problem, the interviewer toyed with me not finding a small mistake in the code. After "deciding to move forward with other candidates" the recruiter declined to provide any feedback on the application. Undeniably it's a great place to work, but the recruiting process left a bad taste in my mouth.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Question selected from the ones already provided. Revise your data structures and their implementation in your language of choice.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 days. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Apr 2012
Interview
The recruiter called up and asked me if I was interested in the job opportunity. The process began with solving a programming problem on InterviewStreet for which I was given 90 minutes to solve. This was followed by a 60 minute telephonic interview. After clearing these two rounds, I was invited onsite and I had to go through 3 face-to-face interviews. The problems were hard algorithmic problems and you are expected to write clean code in the first go. The interviewers were really friendly and helpful. My advice would be that you have confidence in yourself and be as honest in an interview as possible. For practice, you should be well versed with standard algorithmic techniques like dynamic programming, greedy algorithms, solving linear recurrences in logarithmic time, recursion, tree traversals, etc.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
You are given an integer N and an integer M. You are supposed to write a method void findBestCoinsThatMinimizeAverage(int N, int M) that prints the best collection of N coins that minimize the average number of minimum coins needed to generate values from 1 to M. So, if M = 100, and N = 4, then if we use the set {1, 5, 10, 25} to generate each value from 1 to 100, so that for each value the number of coins are minimized, i.e. 1 = 1 (1 coin), 2 = 1 + 1 (2 coins),..., 6 = 1 + 5 (2 coins), ..., 24 = 5 + 5 + 5 + 5 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 (8 coins), and we take the average of these coins, we would see that the average comes out to ~5.7. But if we instead use {1, 5, 18, 25}, the average would come out to be 3.7. We are to find that set of N coins, and print them, that produce the minimum average.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Meta in Apr 2012
Interview
Passed an online puzzle(simple one) then get a phone interview(easy one too). Two days after the phone interview I get an onsite interview(six days later from now).