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)
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.
1 leetcode med, 1 leetcode hard. make sure you know your DSA and leetcode questions. I wasn't able to get an offer bc i didnt complete the second question. Got a reply 2 days later saying they would move on
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.