I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Seattle, WA) in Jul 2024
Interview
Prior to a coding interview, they give you access to a preparation hub. It has a bunch of videos from the author of "Cracking the Coding Interview," which are extremely poorly done. They can be meandering and aren't edited well at all. They play in low-resolution with no option for higher quality, so you often can't even read the code in them. The video player itself is very buggy too, often skipping back to an earlier portion while you're watching. Not much quality control there; perhaps they should hire someone to fix it, though I guess they have little incentive to.
Had a 1 hour interview with 30 mins of standard soft questions, and 25 mins of a coding exercise. It's the standard "coding challenge" thing where if you've memorized data structures, complexity and Big O notation, or even the actual problem which is on Leetcode under "Meta," you'll likely pass. I was able to implement a solution that worked, and realized only later that I had been a little off on stating the time complexity, which likely meant I didn't pass (just my guess). Suggesting the right data structure that could have led to a faster solution also might have helped.
Ultimately, the coding challenge part of these interviews is mostly a test of if you've studied data structures and/or Leetcode problems, and remember them well enough to regurgitate during an interview. Not much to do with actually building software.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
One of the Leetcode coding problems tagged with Meta that was further down the list in frequency.
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