I was contacted by a Facebook recruiter via LinkedIn. Within a few days, I had a non-technical, 30-minute phone interview. After that, we scheduled a first technical interview that could be done in person or over the phone.

Since I live in the area, I opted to do it in person at the Menlo Park facility. The recruiter supplied me with links to several preparation resources and asked for dates when I might be ready for my first technical interview. I chose a date two weeks from the phone screening.

On the day of the interview, I was greeted at Facebook by the recruiter, who showed me around the campus, which consists of over 16 buildings and has many amenities. The recruiter brought me to a small meeting room with two whiteboards. A few minutes later, the interviewer arrived, accompanied by an observer.

The first thing they did was ask me about any current projects I'm working on and the tech stack I use. After talking about that for a few minutes, they presented me with a coding problem, which I could solve in a language of my choice.

I have not done many of the typical coding challenge problems you might see on LeetCode or similar sites. I was relying on my experience and my ability to work through a problem. I read somewhere that interviewers care more about how you approach a problem than how well you can churn out memorized material, so I thought I'd be better off focusing on my overall approach and communication skills.

In that regard, I think I did well, but after reading some other reviews, perhaps I worked too slowly and could have benefited from doing more of those more academic coding exercises. I was given one problem and took the whole 45-ish minutes to solve it. I started with a very general conceptual solution done visually, and then wrote it up as executable code, while addressing bugs and ways it could be made more efficient. Afterwards, I was asked to execute the solution on the whiteboard as if I were an interpreter running the code, noting intermediate values and output.

I did not find the problem very difficult, but I wanted to make sure I stayed engaged with the interviewer and talked through the solution while working on it, which is not how I typically code on my own.

Perform an in-place rearrangement of a list of integers, putting non-zero elements first.

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