Me postulé a través de una recomendación de un empleado. El proceso tomó 4 semanas. Acudí a una entrevista en Meta (Menlo Park, CA) en jul 2013
Entrevista
Application was via an internal referral from a friend who used to work at a start-up I was at. He put me in their system and around 4 days later, a recruiter called for first contact.
The recruiter was quick to assess what I have done and decide to bring me straight in for a 1h30 min interview the next week. In this session I got a quick "hi" from the recruiter and then two 30 min slots, one on architecture and design (so called pirate interview) and the other on coding (ninja). Of the 2, I stormed the coding question but met with an interviewer in the pirate side that had tailored a question from his previous experience in the area I had recently worked in and it didn't work out (mostly as I knew more about the topic and the interviewer wanted to talk about a specific trick he knew). Still, I got called back the next week for a full day.
Lunch, more coding, culture interviews etc... Coding and design were knockouts again, the softer skills were less successful. I think the key here is that you need to present a confident, well rehearsed personality with answers for the usual questions (biggest mistake etc...). DO NOT talk about mistakes and then admit you don't know the root cause for them, even if they were true mysteries. Pick another example!!!
The process took ~4 weeks, the end dragging out by 2 weeks as it seems they could not decide if it was a hire or not. I had multiple offers by this time and had to take one that was expiring and too good to miss. Later I found that there was no hire decision and felt ok about it - I would probably think about going back at some point, but with a stronger prep in the softer skill Q+A side.
Preguntas de entrevista [1]
Pregunta 1
If you go through the career cup questions, all 3 of my questions were on there. One of them I only had 15 mins to answer (the most difficult one) due to over running.
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.
Preguntas de entrevista [1]
Pregunta 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.
Preguntas de entrevista [1]
Pregunta 1
Given an array of strings, pick a subset whose concatenation contains no duplicate characters, and return the maximum possible length of that concatenation.
Standard cookie cutter interview with a coding interview, a system design interview and culture interview. The coding part is basically leetcode. The system design is what you can find on many youtube videos. The culture one is more tricky as they want to see that you fit Meta's culture, not that you were doing great at your existing company. So skills like dealing with conflict without calling in managers is sought after.
Preguntas de entrevista [1]
Pregunta 1
coding: I forgot, sorry
system design: design ticketmaster
culture: talk about past project; when you disagreed with a peer; how I resolved dissagreements, etc.
