The hiring process is standard, involving one phone screen followed by onsite interviews.

I have interviewed twice with Facebook in the last year and a half, and both times, the experience has been terrible.

During the phone screen, the interviewer was typing on his keyboard, creating a consistent, annoying sound that made it almost impossible to concentrate and think. When I politely asked him to stop, he replied, "It's my job to take notes while interviewing; I can't help it." I wonder what notes he was taking just two minutes into the interview.

The hiring process is not at all standardized. They can ask any question, and all you have to do is come up with flawless code. It doesn't matter what question they ask; you must produce the cleanest code of your life, or you are doomed (or rather, saved from being a coding machine). They don't care about your thought process, or if you type up the solution exactly as given on LeetCode. "Code is all we need."

This definitely gives the impression that they want people who can code like a machine and not ask questions. While this might be good for people who just want to go to Facebook for the sake of its name and money, for someone interested in a particular field, Facebook isn't the place.

Apparently, interns have mentioned that everyone in the company is a coding machine and there is absolutely no work-life balance.

The university recruiter is one of a kind, giving phone interviews to everyone at the university and then rejecting everyone. Either the whole university is stupid (which is not the case, as people have offers from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc.), or you are just trying to build up numbers. Not a single person from the whole university received an offer, and almost everyone was interviewed.

In short, I am not interviewing with Facebook again.

Random LeetCode hard question.