The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Meta (Palo Alto, CA) in Jul 2011
Interview
Was referred by an employee and then contacted by an HR. Had 3 rounds of phone interviews and then was called for onsite interviews. The questions were aimed at testing coding and design skills. They are looking for people who can write the correct code at the first go. So my advice would be that you revise all the basic algorithms, look at the common interview questions and practice a lot of coding on paper/whiteboard. The level of questions was not as difficult as Google.
Interview questions [5]
Question 1
Implement a function
char* readLine();
which returns single lines from a buffer. To read the buffer, you can makes use of a function
int read(char* buf, int len)
which fills buf with upto len chars and returns the actual number of chars filled in. Function readLine can be called as many times as desired. If there is no valid data or newline terminated string available, it must block. In order to block, it can use read function which in turn will block when it doesn't have anything to fill the buf.
Implement a function string balanceParanthesis(string s); which given a string s consisting of some parenthesis returns a string s1 in which parenthesis are balanced and differences between s and s1 are minimum.
Eg - "(ab(xy)u)2)" -> "(ab(xy)u)2"
")))(((" -> ""
How will you design facebook newsfeed. Focus was on a design which could handle the huge number of status updates and display them on each of the user's friend's wall.
Took about a month altogether, which felt longer given the intensity of the process. Kicked off with a technical screening, followed by two rigorous coding interviews. The DSA question on binary tree vertical order traversal hit me hard at first, but then I recognized the prompt instantly — I had just worked through something similar on PracHub. The final round was focused on system design, and while I ended up receiving an offer, I ultimately declined it. Overall, a challenging experience that definitely sharpened my skills.
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