I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 days. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Oct 2012
Interview
Nothing exciting here, phone screen and than invite for onsite interview.
Most coding questions you can probably get out of the Programming Interviews Exposed books. Really UN-impressed with any real creativity there. There was an architecture question during the on site which was fun and interesting, but all the coding questions were a waste of time, especially when the person interviewing did not even know the answer to his own question. Overall impressions, campus is beautiful, the people I met were not to the caliper I thought they would be.. Seemed like more talent was at Amazon or Google.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
All the coding question can be found in programming interviews exposed books and websites, they are language agnostic, which is nice.
! of the interviewers not only wanted a correct answer, but *his* answer which was actually largely inefficient, but at least he knew the answer on that one...
The entire process usually takes 3–8 weeks, depending on scheduling and the specific role. Coding interviews heavily emphasize common DSA topics such as arrays, strings, trees, graphs, BFS/DFS, heaps, hash maps, and dynamic programming. System design becomes increasingly important for E4+ positions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given an array of integers and a target value, return the indices of two numbers that add up to the target
Unexpectedly, the first question in the technical round felt familiar. It was about finding a subset of strings with unique character concatenation — same problem I had worked through on PracHub a few days earlier. The interview included a recruiter screen followed by a rigorous pair of technical interviews where I tackled data structures and algorithms alongside system design concepts. After successfully answering a few more challenging DSA questions, I received an offer. The entire experience was intense but ultimately rewarding, and I happily accepted the position.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given an array of strings, pick a subset whose concatenation contains no duplicate characters, and return the maximum possible length of that concatenation.
