The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Meta (Palo Alto, CA) in Nov 2009
Interview
I was contacted via email by HR saying that my friend had recommended I be interviewed for a spot at the company. I was pretty surprised by this, but have found that this is how Facebook often goes about doing things. We scheduled an interview for a few days later, which I thought was going to be a technical interview. When I got on the phone with the interview he asked me about what I've been working on recently, and so I got into this whole thing about my research project which I probably took a good 10 - 15 minutes describing. He basically just verbally nodded through the whole thing. He then asked me about what positions I was interested in interviewing for at Facebook. In my push to prepare for what I was expecting to be a technical interview, I somehow neglected to actually figure out what specifically I could work on at Facebook. I mentioned doing something with the large data sets they work on, since my research focused somewhat loosely on large-scale data analysis. Should have prepped for that one, but no problem. He then told me that he'd be happy to set me up for a phone interview with an engineer as soon as possible and I was like "whaa?! I thought you were one!". Not actually, but I did say that I'd be happy to interview with an engineer and so he got that set up for me. I'll come back and post once I've had my *actual* technical interview (instead of just an HR sanity check)
I applied online. The process took 4 days. I interviewed at Meta (Palo Alto, CA) in Aug 2009
Interview
I had 2 telephonic interviews and the questions are below. Recruiters are pretty cool in facebook.
1. General Resume stuff.
2. Merge Sort - Write code for it. Complexity.
3. SQL - self join: Asked me to write a query, don't remember the exact question.
4. Advantage of B Trees - Used in databases for indexing. Adv. Less number of memory lookups because of less hierarchy. Large fanout.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a set of inputs <number, userid> in a log file:
log: <number, userid>
example:
1,2
1,1
2,1
3,1
1,2
out: <number, count>
1,2
2,1
3,1
The output should be all the unique numbers and the count associated with them.
The process took 6 days. I interviewed at Meta (Palo Alto, CA) in May 2009
Interview
Did a phone screen on Friday to discuss with Facebook was working on and what I wanted to work on. This moved to Onsite technical interview on following Tuesday, they moved quickly because of another pending offer with another company. Did well, Then moved to meet with more members of the team on Thursday, moved to offer on Friday and then accepted within 1 day.