I applied through university. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Palo Alto, CA) in Feb 2011
Interview
They had a booth at my college job fair. I gave them my resume, and had a 1:1 interview at my college the day after. They called me at night to tell me I had made it trough the first interview and that they wanted to see me again. It went well so they invited me to Palo Alto for an on-site interview.
It was my first interview, so I might have been too stressed to think straight, but I feel like some questions were pretty hard. The first interviewers (they were 2) asked me easy questions, but the second (he gave no feedback at all) and the third interviewers asked hard questions. The last interviewer asked me: define a function that computes log2(). I gave him the Taylor expansion, and a newton's method approach, but he wanted something else... He wanted me to use sqrt(). I'm not sure whether he was assessing my skills at finding a solution given a weird constraint (e.g., use sqrt()), or if there is an obvious solution that I missed.
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.
Standard cookie cutter interview with a coding interview, a system design interview and culture interview. The coding part is basically leetcode. The system design is what you can find on many youtube videos. The culture one is more tricky as they want to see that you fit Meta's culture, not that you were doing great at your existing company. So skills like dealing with conflict without calling in managers is sought after.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
coding: I forgot, sorry
system design: design ticketmaster
culture: talk about past project; when you disagreed with a peer; how I resolved dissagreements, etc.
