While I was planning to look actively for a job in the next weeks, I was first contacted by a Facebook recruiter (an employee, not a 3rd party company) on LinkedIn. I never really thought about Facebook at first, maybe because I imagined it was an unreachable goal.

We scheduled a first phone screen. It was short, about 10 minutes. I spoke a bit about my background, and he explained what Facebook is looking for and a bit of the recruiting process. After asking me 3 very easy Objective-C and iOS programming questions, he said he would like to schedule a phone interview with a Facebook engineer for me.

Two weeks later (he apologized for the long delay; I guess it's usually quicker), I had a phone interview. An engineer interviewed me, spending the first 10 minutes chatting about my background, interests, and goals, then a 30-minute peer-coding session. As usual, it was an algorithmic question to solve in Objective-C / CoreFoundation (NSString, NSArray, NS* APIs...). She said I would be contacted again by a recruiter in the next few days.

I got a call, and the recruiter said I was welcome to come on-site for a day of interviews. I gladly accepted. I then started to think I had some decent chances to get a job at this awesome company.

The big day arrived, and I was very excited and relaxed too. I took BART from the city and then a cab to the Menlo Park HQ. The recruiter warmly welcomed me, we had some coffee, and chatted while waiting for the first engineer/interviewer.

The 4 interviews were as described on the Facebook Careers website.

• First interviewer chatted a bit about my previous projects, and then we had a technical question involving iOS general knowledge, Objective-C skills, etc.
• Second interviewer spent most of the time chatting about my previous projects, my goals, and what I would like to change at Facebook if I were working there; then we moved to a quick technical question.

Then it was lunchtime. I was really excited about going to visit the campus, get some good lunch, and see how Facebookers are during lunchtime. Many bring their MacBooks to lunch, have some fun with colleagues, and enjoy their meals. The lunchtime was spent with the recruiter.

After he brought me back to the interview room, the 2 next interviews were mostly algorithmic questions. Overall, I found the questions to be of an average level. Some iOS knowledge is required, some good sense of algorithms, and remembering Objective-C syntax.

Many say, and it's true, that unlike other companies, Facebook likes people who can code on a whiteboard with the correct syntax. It happened that I forgot a semicolon or wrote @implement instead of @interface. The interviewer asked me if I was sure about my syntax; I read again my code and found my mistake. They are never (at least very rarely) misleading you. If they say "read again," it probably means "there is a syntax error; find it – it's a bonus."

A few days later, I got an email and then a call from the recruiter, who said he got very positive feedback from the interviews, so he would like me to gather and send him some reference letters. So I did. A few days later, I got a call and was told I got an offer. It was a very good one.

Overall, the whole process was of course stressful, but very exciting, and all interviews were in a very relaxed atmosphere. It was like chatting with new colleagues and trying to solve a problem together.

I don't want to disclose the exact question. This is not only because of the NDA I signed, but also because it won't be fun if you have this exact same question, and I don't think it would help you anyway.

One question one of the interviewers asked me was, "What was the most difficult thing you had to deal with?"