Software Engineer Interview Experience - Menlo Park, California
Process
Applied through a current employee referral and was contacted for an initial phone call within 2 weeks.
Afterwards, I was booked for a technical phone screen. I spoke with a very nice engineer who had not been at Facebook for too long. During the interview, I was asked two fairly standard coding challenges dealing with strings and arrays.
I went for an onsite interview 2-3 weeks later. Overall, I think they could have scheduled it a little better. I was told to arrive 15 minutes early, which is normal, and we ended up starting my interview early. The first two rounds were technical coding. We were allotted about 1.5 hours but finished a bit earlier.
Afterwards, I sat in the room for about 30 minutes waiting for someone to get me for lunch. Around noontime, I was picked up for lunch by the hiring manager, who took me to the canteen.
After lunch, I returned to the room to start my interviews again.
Phone screen: Easy or medium LeetCode problems.
Onsite: Tree, graph, merge segments challenges. Design a news feed.
Preparation: LeetCode, Aonecode.
Questions
Diameter of binary tree.
Find number of islands.
Meeting room problem.
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Interview Statistics
The following metrics were computed from 359 interview experiences for the Meta Software Engineer role in Menlo Park, California.
Success Rate
Meta's interview process for their Software Engineer roles in Menlo Park, California is very selective, failing most engineers who go through it.
Experience Rating
Candidates reported having very good feelings for Meta's Software Engineer interview process in Menlo Park, California.
Meta Work Experiences
- 4.0Big Tech company that's still learning what that meansSoftware Engineer • Current EmployeeMenlo Park, California, United StatesSeptember 7, 2020Pros: - The engineering culture is still very bottom-up: teams generally have a lot of power and responsibility to determine what they work on. - Internal developer tools are a huge focus. Anything which slows developers down is fixed if possible. - Very good internal mobility: bootcamp means you have a good deal of leeway in finding a team, and, after a year, internal mobility is encouraged. - Tons of opportunities to make millions of people's lives just a little bit better. Like it or not, Facebook's products are used by over a billion people worldwide. There are few places where improvements and fixes can have such a broad reach. - Lots of intellectual challenges: There are many types of challenges in building products for billions of people: technical (scaling and perf), product (how do you make it useful for everyone), regulatory (how to not fall afoul of privacy regulations), security (how to minimize badness that happens due to the products), and more.Cons: The biggest challenge facing Facebook right now is that it is simultaneously too big to run the way it runs now (with teams trying to fight for impact and all hacking on the same products), and too small to fit with the well-intentioned goals that Mark has for all of the ways that Facebook can help people. A company without any strong sense of unifying purpose tends toward bloat and stagnation. It feels like this is the direction Facebook is heading. The amount of infighting between teams around responsibility and ownership of new features is growing and will only keep accelerating.
- 2.0Clear Promo Path, High PressureSoftware Engineer • Current EmployeeMenlo Park, California, United StatesApril 23, 2023Pros: Clear guidelines and timeline for promo.Cons: Lots of emphasis on performing well and shipping something tangible for performance review.
- 2.0Culture has degraded so badlySoftware Engineer • Current EmployeeMenlo Park, California, United StatesFebruary 24, 2023Pros: - Free food - Campus amenitiesCons: - Brutal performance reviews (hits hard if you depend on bonuses) - Too much middle management - Pushing changes out the door requires too many steps for it to feel fulfilling
Meta Interview Questions
