I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Palo Alto, CA) in Sep 2008
Interview
I applied online through the Facebook website and heard back from HR within 2 weeks. After speaking with the recruiter, we setup a phone interview with one of the engineers. The phone interview was about 20 minutes long and consisted of 2 questions which were algorithmic in nature, one of which was reversing a linked list. I heard back from them about a week later and we setup a time for an on-site interview. I was alotted $1000USD for travel expenses to travel from Toronto, ON to Palo Alto, CA. The on-site interview lasted 4 hours and was split up into 1 hour interviews with a different engineer. The questions were mostly abstract, and language independent. Content of the questions varied from riddles to database design. My impression of the first three engineers was good, they seemed like nice guys, and knowledgeable. The last interviewer came off as pretentious, I felt as though he wanted me to fail -- just my opinion!
Overall, the office culture seemed relaxed and the problems they are solving there are interesting ones. I'd recommend interviewing with them if only for the chance to visit Palo Alto!
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
You have two lightbulbs and a 100-storey building. You want to find the floor at which the bulbs will break when dropped. Find the floor using the least number of drops.
Took about a month from start to finish, which felt longer than I expected. After a couple of initial phone screenings, I faced a challenging technical round focused on system design. It was during this round that I was asked to describe overcoming a major career challenge. Interestingly, I had just reviewed a similar framework on PracHub, which helped me articulate my thoughts clearly. Overall, I appreciated the depth of the process and ended up accepting the offer.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Describe Overcoming a Major Challenge in Your Career
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.
