The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Meta in Feb 2011
Interview
I got my resume submitted through an existing employer at Facebook. Was first contacted by a recruiter who called me up and had a half hour talk with me discussing why I wanted to join Facebook, and surprisingly also started asking me data structures and C++ basics like friend functions, complexity of searching and sorting etc (though she assured me that this was not an interview and only an informal chat). I got all her questions correct, though I donot know if that made any difference. I followed up with her sending her an email regarding scheduling an interview and then she wrote back gconfirming a phone interview slot. It was a phone screen with a Software Engineer at Facebook, and I was asked to code in Collabedit, a web interface in which both I and he could write and see the code.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
You are given intervals of contiguous integers, like [1, 10), [15, 25), [40, 50), which are non-overlapping and of a fixed size.
Design a data structure to store these intervals and have the operations of insert, delete, and find functions
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
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.
