I applied through a recruiter. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at Meta
Interview
I was contacted by a recruiter about a possible position. While I was not immediately looking, I was intrigued enough to continue with the process.
I had a quick phone call with my recruiter to go over my background and experience. She concluded the phone call by determining my availability for a technical phone screen and followed up with some research materials to better prepare for the phone screen.
The technical phone screen was set up using collabedit as the platform for sharing code between myself and the interviewer. I was asked a few simple technical questions, and a few harder programming problems dealing with algorithms and data structures. The interviewer was patient and helpful.
The recruiter emailed me the same evening to let me know that I would not be moving further in the process, as my initial hesitations on the early data structure questions signalled poor understanding of basic concepts.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
You are given a string with each english character translated to its alphabetical position (e.g., the string "ABC" --> "123"). Provide a function that, when provided the string as an argument, will return the maximum number of strings the encoded string could represent (for example, "123" could represent "ABC", "LC", or "AW").
2 step process - started with a phone screen. Most of time on the phone screen was taken by a programming challenge, which was done through one of those online code editors. Passed it to get an on-site interview. Your interview continues so long as you're doing well. At then end, you get a tour of the facebook campus before being showed out.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Can't answer due to NDA, although it's nothing unexpected. Algorithmic problems and whiteboard coding. Try to keep whiteboard coding as eat and organized as possible, and speak out load when you're writing.
I applied online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Meta (Palo Alto, CA) in Jul 2011
Interview
Phone screen, Excel test, phone interview, skype interviews, 30 page assignment, flew out for on-site interviews, more phone interviews, flew out again for on-site interviews.
They put me through the ringer before they hired me. But the questions were relevant and the people I met were great. This was back in their Palo Alto offices though.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Pre-IPO, they asked me to write a paper on the valuation of Facebook. They also asked me what I thought the greatest technological advancement was in the past 20 years.