Me postulé en línea. El proceso tomó 2 semanas. Acudí a una entrevista en Meta (Palo Alto, CA) en oct 2010
Entrevista
The rumours about the hiring process being haphazard are true. First a manager phone screened me and asked me to come to Palo Alto. Next the recruiter told me I stll need to go through a phone screen. If the disconnect stopped there it would have been OK. I did not expect to get invited to Palo Alto without a tech screen.
Here's the kicker. I am a senior engineer in my present job. The person who phone screened me was a fresh college hire and had spent about 1 month working at facebook. Facebook was that person's first job. I am not saying a new hire cannot be smarter than a senior person, but it is reasonable to think that it would be a good practice at a big company to allow new hires especially fresh out of school to settle down, understand the needs of the company and then start interviewing people.
You are trying to rob houses on a street. Each house has some +ve amount of cash. Your goal is to rob houses such that you maximize the total robbed amount. The constraint is once you rob a house you cannot rob a house adjascent to that house.
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.
The interview felt more straightforward than I anticipated for a well-known tech giant. After a recruiter screen, I faced a technical round that included a DSA question about finding the lowest common ancestor in a binary tree. I was pleasantly surprised when I realized the exact problem had popped up in the algorithm practice section on PracHub during my prep. Ultimately, the experience was decent, but I chose to decline the offer as it didn’t align with my current goals.
Preguntas de entrevista [1]
Pregunta 1
Given a binary tree, find the lowest common ancestor of two given nodes in the tree.
