I applied online. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Meta (Seattle, WA) in Mar 2016
Interview
I applied for the position and quickly received a response that they were interested (about 1 day). They informed me that there was first a technical interview, then if I passed that, they would schedule a second culture/fit interview.
Facebook provides access to a sponsored interview prep session by Gayle McDowell (author of "Cracking the Coding Interview") which were provided on a twice-a-week basis indefinitely, in in-person and online form.
From this point on it was clear that they are very interested in churning through interview candidates at a rapid pace. I scheduled an interview a week after their contact, and ran prep (LeetCode.com offers a lot of questions in the style of their whiteboard tech interview) as much as I could.
There were three other candidates in the lobby at the same time as me. I can only assume that there are as many as a couple dozen interviews done daily at this rate (they were scheduled 15 minutes before me).
The technical interview is scheduled for a pretty tight (not hard, but they will stop you) 45 minutes. You'll get asked some sort of non-linear algorithmic question, and you MUST FOLLOW THE INTERVIEW PREP INSTRUCTIONS PRECISELY. One of the options for blueprinting out your solution is to maybe toss some pseudocode up explaining your algorithm - I did it a little while trying to explain and got dinged for "jumped to coding right away."
As far as I can tell, they go through enough candidates that they can be extremely picky with their technical selection - ace it, you're golden. One misstep and you're chopped liver.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given an n*n matrix filled randomly with different colors (no limit on what the colors are), add up the total number of groups of each color - a group is adjacent cells of the same color touching each other.
Clarifying question: are diagonals adjacent (A: no)
Overall, the process took a little over two weeks, which felt a bit longer than I anticipated. After a quick screening, I went through two technical rounds focusing on coding and DSA concepts. One of the questions was a classic palindrome check; mid-way through, I realized it was something I had practiced on PracHub just days earlier. The final step was a casual behavioral interview. I was relieved to get an offer shortly after, which I happily accepted.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a string, determine if it is a valid palindrome considering only alphanumeric characters and ignoring case.
I applied online. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA)
Interview
It's honestly striaght from leetcode tagged
There are no surprises if you do tagged you would be good and do well.
System design is much harder. Would recommend using hello interview.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design Twitter and consider if it was suddenly an extremely low latency env
Grateful doesn't even begin to describe how I feel about landing this role. The interview loop was smooth and friendly. They kicked things off with a technical round where I faced a DSA question about verifying an alien dictionary. Lucky for me, the time I'd spent on PracHub paid off, as it had the same type of problem just days before. After that, I had a system design discussion and a behavioral interview. Everything felt very collaborative, and by the end, I received an offer that I was thrilled to accept.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a list of words written in an alien language and the order of letters in that language's alphabet, determine whether the words are sorted lexicographically (Verifying an Alien Dictionary). Walk through the comparison approach using a character-to-index map, the O(C) time complexity where C is total characters, and how you'd extend it to handle words with mixed-case letters or words containing characters outside the given alphabet.