I applied through college or university. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA)
Interview
Process:
This is for undergrad full-time software candidates in USA. Submitted resume at college career fair. Got email about on-campus interviews. At this stage, there are 3 possible outcomes: onsite invitation, a phone interview for an additional chance, or reject. I was invited to onsite interview.
Onsite was a "University Day" that included three interviews (not four like they said in the email) before lunch and then a tour, new-hire panel, etc after lunch.
All interviews were 45-mins length.
Interviews themselves:
On-campus interview: 3 coding questions. I don't remember signing any NDA at this point so, the questions were k-Nearest Points to Origin, finding a substring, and 3-sum.
On-site interview: 3 interviews, 45 mins each. 1st interview: 2 coding questions. 2nd interview: behavioral questions (about team conflict, etc.) and a coding question. 3rd interview: 2 coding questions. Coding questions were easy and required *no knowledge* of special algorithms or data structures (such as graphs, DP, trees, etc). Recursion and strings were common.
I did not get an offer from Facebook; however, I received offers from other companies. The interview questions themselves were considerably easier at Facebook than those asked at Google, LinkedIn, MS, Amazon, etc.
Since the questions are not very hard, my guess is the decision is based upon fit and most importantly how *quickly* you were able to arrive at your solution and how *perfect* your code was. Make sure you focus and are confident.
Advice: practice the easier questions and practice coding them. Also, looking at some of the other experiences on Glassdoor, it looks like a majority of the questions are re-used.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Just prepare for some common behavioral questions.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (London, England) in Apr 2014
Interview
I was contacted by a recruiter on LinkedIn. After a general chat with recruiter (current role, relocation, tech skills) we went ahead with the phone screen.
I was asked 2 coding questions, which I coded, but I needed some hints in the second one.
A few days later I got the email that the team would not like to move forward. And I can setup a call for review the feedback, which I didn't. I knew I wasn't super fast on coding, and problem solving.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Nothing difficult.
Reverse String
Pair words that are Anagrams of each other.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Meta
Interview
I got the opportunity through internal referral.
I passed an technical phone screening and was invited to an on-site. I had 5 interviews in total. Two coding, two system design, one with manager (on PhD research + a quick coding exercise).
The technical questions were not too difficult, but I was unprepared for the system design problems. One of the interviewers kept walking around in the room and was really distracting and annoying. I couldn't focus on solving the problem and didn't do well in that session.
The interviewing schedule was not the best. I was scheduled to have lunch at 2pm PST, but considering I'm from a couple time zones east of PST, I was already way too hungry to have lunch at that time. Perhaps a low blood sugar level also contributed to my impaired thinking abilities.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Signed NDA. Distributed system design problems were out of my expectation as I do not claim any experience in that area nor was I interviewing with any positions related to that area.