My conversation with Facebook started when a recruiter sent me an email. We scheduled a call where she asked about my interests and background. Surprisingly, the recruiter asked me a technical question. It wasn't hard (Fibonacci function and its optimizations), but it was unexpected. Anyway, I answered her question in detail (bottom-up solution, top-down, DP), and she replied that it was exactly what she expected to hear.

Since I'm local to the Bay Area, I had the opportunity to have a 1:1 onsite screen instead of a phone screen. I chose that option, and we arranged the interview for a week later. The onsite screen was good. The interviewer was very nice and friendly and was very helpful during the interview. There was an impression that he wanted to see my thought process. Eventually, I solved the problem, which was of average difficulty. I started with brute force and then optimized it.

Two days later, I got a call from the recruiter. She told me I did well, and we scheduled the onsite interview.

There were 5 interviews for the onsite: whiteboard programming, whiteboard programming, resume discussion with coding, architecture discussion, and whiteboard programming. The problems were of average difficulty. I was kind of slow on the first and last coding interviews; I think it was expected to solve a couple of problems instead of one. All interviewers were very friendly and helpful. At the end, all of them shared that I solved the problem correctly and in an efficient way and that it was okay that we solved only one problem.

I already wanted to say that regardless of the result, my experience was positive, but after the interview, I had a pretty bad experience. I didn't have any response or feedback for 2 weeks after the interview. I expected rejection, but the silence in the first week gave me some hope that they were thinking about me (I was slow on the interview, but I didn't fail it completely).

After the first week of silence, I tried to contact my recruiter and eventually figured out that she had left Facebook and hadn't moved my case to anyone. I tried to contact the Facebook careers page on Facebook, but it was helpless; they didn't reply to me. So, I found the coordinator's email (who scheduled my interview), and she finally shared the decision with me.

I used LeetCode and HackerRank for preparation, but some interview questions were new for me. These included 3SUM, interval intersection, palindrome problems, and BST to linked list conversion.

I would recommend solving as many questions as you can; any slowness in your thinking is not welcomed.