I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Apr 2017
Interview
A recruiter reached out to me in LinkedIn and setup a phone interview. There were 2 persons on the phone call during the interview. First I was asked to talk about myself and a specific feature that I developed at my current work. Then I jumped onto the coding problem on coderpad. I didn't like the attitude or the vibe that I got from the interviewers (only one person was talking to me on the phone). At the end when I was asking questions about FB, he gave me a very generalized info and didn't really show any enthusiasm which right away made me figure out that he wasn't happy. Also during the interview, I think he wanted to give me a bit difficult challenge but he couldn't really explain to me clearly and hence I didn't understand what exactly he wanted. But on the other hand the recruiter was outstanding. She called me twice before the interview and reviewed the practice that I was doing for the interview. Even after the interview, she called me and explained to me the result and possible things which I could work on for next time.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design and write code for a queue system which would include enqueue, dequeue, etc.
I applied through college or university. I interviewed at Meta (Buffalo, NY) in Feb 2017
Interview
Get interview though the university workshop, the interview is after a week, I interviewed with phone call at Feb.2017, the interview takes 45 min, start with self introduction, and directly into the tech problem solving use code pad
I applied online. I interviewed at Meta (San Francisco, CA)
Interview
Standard computer science/algorithms phone screen interview.
I've been a few years in my current job, and I have decided to try the job market again. My resume is impressive, I haven't padded it in any way, I've led software projects to release on time, and I'm finding it easy to get as far as phone screens, but no further.
This isn't a criticism of Facebook itself, rather of the whole Bay Area software engineering scene - since the last time I went for interviews, there seems to be a much bigger focus on getting the initial computer science/algorithms questions correct on the first go. Miss an edge case that the interviewer brings up, you're toast. Misplace a < instead of <= in an iteration, you're toast even if you find it yourself. Take longer than 20 minutes per question, you're toast. Try to recreate from first principles an algorithm you haven't thought about since you graduated, or never, ever used in your work, you're toast.
I've interviewed many people in my current job, and never regretted recommending employment to any of them. Every single one of the people I've recommended have made mistakes in their coding tests, and every one of them managed to find the errors when I pointed out that they had made a mistake. Perhaps I have lower standards, but when I interview, I look for how the interviewee recovers from a mistake, not that they are able to regurgitate something they learned from reading over Glassdoor interview questions.
Or maybe I just come across badly on the phone. Hard to say.
To recreate the process, go to leetcode and try some of the medium/hard exercises. If you can't complete it in under 20 minutes, and you have to redo some work to cover all the edge cases on submitting the solution, you can be sure that in an interview employers will thank you for applying, praise you for your impressive resume, and tell you no thanks.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Variation of standard algorithm question. Corrected code on being given edge case. Took 25 minutes to get satisfactory answer - probably too long for the interviewer.
Second question was a dynamic program question - I knew how to find the solution but hadn't even thought of the algorithm for several years. Was unable to complete the solution in the remaining 20 minutes.