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Senior Software Engineer Interview Experience - Menlo Park, California

May 1, 2014
Positive ExperienceNo Offer

Process

A recruiter contacted me.

The first telephonic interview was 45 minutes long and included a single coding question.

All interviewers were good, except for one who asked system design questions. This interviewer was rude and seemed to want to show off.

The interview process included:

  1. Behavioral questions: Prepare for difficult bug-related questions. Be ready to answer what you want to do at Facebook.
  2. Lunch
  3. System Design: Give more importance to these types of questions. I was asked to design a system to run a command on all servers (say, 1 million) within the same network from one of the servers on that network.
  4. Coding: Given an NxN matrix with values X and O, where X represents land and O represents water, find the number of islands. Two consecutive 'X's (horizontal or vertical) are part of a single island, while diagonal 'X's are not. (Solve using graph traversal: DFS or BFS).
  5. Coding: From a list of strings, generate a list of lists of strings where each inner list contains anagrams of each other.

I felt I did really well, but I guess not as well compared to other candidates.

Overall, the interview was easy if you have prepared for algorithms and data structures. Please pay more attention to:

  1. Writing perfect code on a whiteboard.
  2. System design questions.

Questions

Nothing unexpected.

System design was tricky.

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Interview Statistics

The following metrics were computed from 44 interview experiences for the Meta Senior Software Engineer role in Menlo Park, California.

Success Rate

9%
Pass Rate

Meta's interview process for their Senior Software Engineer roles in Menlo Park, California is extremely selective, failing the vast majority of engineers.

Experience Rating

Positive52%
Neutral23%
Negative25%

Candidates reported having very good feelings for Meta's Senior Software Engineer interview process in Menlo Park, California.

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