I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Meta in Apr 2013
Interview
I applied online through Linkedin and got an email from a FB recruiter asking whether we can arrange sometime to talk on phone. We then had a quick talk on phone about what I was doing, what I had done related to software development, and how was an interview process with FB. Then he said he will arrange a phone interview for me. The first phone interviewer was nice and I can answer the question easily although I did not understand the question correctly. But he was very patient explaining it to me and I finally did it right. After a week I received an email from the recruiter saying that the response to the first interview was positive and they wanted to schedule another phone interview. The second phone interview was a week later with a Chinese girl who did not sound friendly or enthusiastic but with a cold voice. I felt that she did not like me and would not want me to be in FB since the beginning of the interview. This made me very nervous and confused, and I lost my confidence. Hence, even though the question was quite simple but I did not do it well. I can guess what happen next: I got a "thanks from FB" the day after.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The questions are easy and common, but I was very disappointed with the second phone interviewer. The first interviewer was very nice and supportive. The first question was to return the value of a roman number given in a string. The question for the second phone interview was to print out the paths to all leaves of a binary tree.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Feb 2013
Interview
My application was submitted through an internal referral, and I was contacted by the recruiter within a week. The recruiter was very helpful in providing tips on preparing the interview and the format of the interview.
Even though I didn't get an offer, the overall interview process was very pleasant. Each interviewer is assigned to test on one or two specific skill set of yours. All the coding and design questions are fair interview questions, and the interviewers were all pretty friendly.
I had an additional "practice" interview to prepare an interviewer to learn how to interview. Also, most of the interviews had a shadow interviewer, but this seems to be the norm for all the companies I interviewed.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
My interview with a manager, he asked me a real internal problem they have and asked me to propose a solution. The question is really interesting, but I feel it's a bit hard for an outsider to give an answer that's effective and not overly complicated
Pretty straightforward interview process - screener interview followed by a 4 interview loop. Facebook uses the loop to do two standard algorithms/data structures technical interviews, one manager/fit interview and one "design" interview which I misunderstood to mean user facing design, but instead is more of an architecture, big box drawing exercise.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Asked to design a system for facebook chat messaging. Difficult since I hadn't had any backend/distributed systems experience.