I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Phoenix, AZ) in Feb 2015
Interview
I applied through a referral, 1 Skype interview (2 were scheduled but I didn't make it past the first one). The interviewer briefly introduced himself and asked me a coding question straight away. I chose to use Java. No behavioral questions, just 1 coding question. Contrary to what most people have said, I got an interviewer who wasn't very friendly. He was there to do his job. Plain and simple.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Before I get to the question I just want to say that the interviewer had a very thick accent (I'm an international candidate, BTW), and that made it really difficult for me to understand what he wanted me to do. This isn't me being bitter. I'm saying this so that I present a very honest opinion about my interview.
That being said, the question wasn't something that can be found online or in most books, I was given 2 functions String recv() and String ReadLine() [ both these DO NOT take arguments]. recv() generates some string (Example:"123\n45\n6789"). ReadLine() should read the string being returned by recv() and print all characters until the first \n. After that it should read the recv() string again and print the next characters until the 2nd \n.
Example: recv(): "123\n45\n6789"
ReadLine(): "123" //first call of ReadLine
ReadLine(): "45" // second call of ReadLine
However, the next sequence now doesn't have a \n. So, once the end of the string is hit, the ReadLine() function must call recv() again, and append all characters until it reads a \n.
Continuing the above example: ReadLine():6789abcde //Third call of ReadLine
recv():"abc"// still no \n...so you must call recv() again
recv():"de\n"
The commented sections are my explanations (the interviewer didn't give any such things). I've explained the problem as clearly as I can. Unfortunately, the interviewer kept overwriting his examples, and (I have to emphasize this) his accent made it really hard to understand just what he wanted out of this program.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Meta in Jan 2015
Interview
I was referred to Facebook by a friend who works there and was contacted by a member of HR about a week later. We set up a date for a 45-minute technical phone interview which was to be held a week and a half later.
For the actual interview, I was first asked a couple of generic questions about myself and Facebook before moving on to the technical questions. There were two programming questions.
For the first question, I first described what my algorithm would be, then discussed time and space complexity before finally implementing it. My interviewer didn't have anything to say about my answer and we simply moved on.
I took the same basic approach to the second question; described my algorithm, discussed space/time complexity, and then implemented it. However, after discussing the space and time complexity for my potential solution, my interviewer asked me if I saw any draw-backs to my algorithm. I told him that it used a lot of extra space, and he asked if I could think of a more efficient (space-wise) solution. I thought about it for awhile, but unfortunately blanked out. He then suggested I just go ahead and implement my algorithm.
The last 5 or so minutes of the 45 minute interview were devoted to me asking questions. I asked a few, and the interview was over.
I received a generic rejection email 3 days later.
Given "data", "from", and "to" fields, replaces all occurrences of the characters in the "from" field in the "data" field, with their counterparts in the "to" field.
Example:
Input:
Data: "Hello World"
From: "lod"
To: "xpf"
Output:
"Hexxp Wprxf"
I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Meta
Interview
I had my friend referred me to the intern position. It took about 3 weeks to hear from a recruiter. The process was pretty easy. After only one phone interview I was invited to go onsite. The phone interview takes 45 minutes. First talked about one of my previous projects. Then two technical problems.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The first one is, given a tree, each node contains a digit. Calculate the sum of all numbers formed by paths from root to leaf.
The second one is given a string, remove all 'b's and duplicate all 'a's.