I applied through college or university. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Meta (Palo Alto, CA) in Nov 2010
Interview
First I had a phone interview. The question was fairly straight-forward (multiply two very large numbers given as Strings) and the interviewer wasn't looking for any tricks or anything like that to solve. Like others have mentioned, quick clean code seems to be the key. Unfortunately, the interviewer had a very thick East Asian accent and talking over the phone just made things worse. I had to ask him to repeat quite a few times. It was probably me but at times I couldn't even tell when he'd asked a question because of the inflection! It must've gone well enough though because I got an on-site call.
The on-site was two interviews of 45 min each. In the first one, I took a bit of a hit because a) I couldn't see the solution right away b) it took me a while to get up to speed and code the thing - I did manage to finish it though and it seemed (relatively) bug-free. Again, as lots of people have mentioned, the interviewer seemed quite young, just a year or so out of school and he didn't offer much in terms of feedback - positive or negative - as the interview progressed. Once he'd given me the question and given me the hint that got me started, he was busy with his iPhone, rarely looking up. That kinda sucked.
The second interviewer was much nicer - probably one of the best ones I've interviewed with - lots of feedback, lots of encouragement, was accepting of different trains of thought and non-standard answers. Seemed like a really nice guy too.
Overall, it seems to be the case with Facebook that
a) Your interview really depends on who you get
b) They seem to value quick-clean-bug free-optimized code at the first try more than anything else
c) Questions are of average to above-average difficulty (if you've prepared!)
Interview questions [5]
Question 1
Write a function to take a BST and a value k as input and have it print the kth smallest element in the BST.
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.
