I applied through college or university. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Palo Alto, CA) in Oct 2012
Interview
After a phone interview from the recruiter, I had a rather easy Skype technical interview (3 algorithmic questions, answered all of them correctly). Within 2 weeks I was informed that I was approved for an onsite interview in Palo Alto HQ. There I had 4 consecutive interviews (Ninja, Pirate, Jedi, Ninja). Ninja interviews require coding in board practice - quite difficult since if you answer correctly in one of them they ask something else. Jedi was related to my PhD. Pirate was the most difficult one as there were no right/wrong answer and questions were related to database design and overall Facebook feature design. The interviewers were very friendly and helpful. In overall, a great experience!
Got a referral through a friend who worked at Meta, which sped up the entire process. After a casual initial chat, I went through a technical interview where I faced a DSA question about validating palindromes. The interviewer was friendly but rigorous. During prep, I had spent time with the coding challenges on PracHub, and it was funny to see a similar palindrome question pop up. Overall, I received an offer, but ultimately decided to decline it after careful consideration.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a string s, return true if it can be a palindrome after deleting at most one character (Valid Palindrome II).
Recruiter call was pretty standard, first round was 2 Meta tagged LC mediums in 45 minutes. On-site was 2 coding sessions of 2 LC mediums, a system design interview and a behavioral interview with an engineering manager.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How do you answer if someone asks how long a deliverable or project will take?
The entire process usually takes 3–8 weeks, depending on scheduling and the specific role. Coding interviews heavily emphasize common DSA topics such as arrays, strings, trees, graphs, BFS/DFS, heaps, hash maps, and dynamic programming. System design becomes increasingly important for E4+ positions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given an array of integers and a target value, return the indices of two numbers that add up to the target
