Software Engineer Interview Experience - Menlo Park, California
November 1, 2012
Negative ExperienceNo Offer
Process
I had a brief phone conversation with the interviewer initially, who then scheduled a technical interview with an engineer working at Facebook HQ.
The second technical interview was fairly relaxed. I was asked to solve two problems using collabedit.com:
- Finding all the anagrams in an array of strings.
- Finding the number of ways a given score could be reached for a game with three different ways of scoring (e.g., 3, 5, and 10 points).
After the phone interview, I was offered an onsite interview in Menlo Park (travel expenses paid for). The interview day involved four back-to-back interviews with different engineers. The questions varied in complexity and required answers to be given on a whiteboard. Those I can remember were:
- Implementing combinations(n, k).
- Printing a binary tree left-to-right.
- Implementing a comparator function to sort files based on a certain naming convention.
I found it difficult to make any personal connections with my interviewers. They all seemed rushed and uninterested in striking up conversation; it was not an enjoyable experience. Indeed, my first interviewer was clearly more interested in what he was working on, as he arrived approximately 20 minutes late.
Questions
Providing an algorithm for combinations (n, k). This is not because of its complexity, but rather because it took the majority of the interview to understand that this was the problem I was solving. The problem was not made very clear at all.
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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
28%
Pass 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
Positive69%
Neutral18%
Negative13%
Candidates reported having very good feelings for Meta's Software Engineer interview process in Menlo Park, California.
Meta Work Experiences
5.0
Good Pay, Skip The Tests
Software Engineer • Current Employee
Menlo Park, California, United States
October 18, 2021
Pros: Good pay.
Work is reasonable.
Don't need to write tests.
Cons: No free food WFH now.
2.0
Good for fresh grads who can sell their soul
Software Engineer • Current Employee
Menlo Park, California, United States
October 5, 2019
Pros: Lot of perks that a fresh grad would care for. Food is awesome. Good medical and 401k benefits, maybe a bit better than most companies.
Fast promotion if you can work long hours.
Fast-paced environment; you'll get to learn new stuff all the time. Lot of smart engineers around.
Cons: With fast promotion comes fast firing. It's an "up or out" policy up to a certain level.
Not a good place for senior engineers joining. Too much stress in the team, driven by performance reviews, which are the most aggressive that I've ever known. Emphasis is on individual impact, due to which there's a lot of distrust within the team. No stack ranking, but a curve is implemented at the org level. This is not a big deal in other companies, but here it means 'out'. Managers' main job is to write performance reviews, and this often leads to micromanagement that can be extremely frustrating to senior engineers.
There's a lot of work duplication. Most managers (even directors) ignore it as performance reviews are all about impact. Most engineers know that everyone wants to write code and make impact, so they ignore the code duplication.
Some teams are hiring just for the headcount, with not much impactful work. This becomes a problem for senior engineers, as they have to invent work or get out. Before joining a team, check out their roadmap for at least a year.
This is a good place if you want to make money at the cost of WLB. Not a place to be innovative, which inherently carries risk and takes time. It's a risk because if there's no impact, you'll be fired. Most of the engineers work to satisfy performance reviews. My work is determined, keeping performance reviews as the guideline.
But the company will be fine; there are a lot of good engineers capable of quickly delivering a fix or hacking a feature.
3.0
The company is on the decline
Software Engineer • Current Employee
Menlo Park, California, United States
December 14, 2022
Pros: Benefits are great, although they may go down now that they are tightening their belts. Great compensation, although with the stock price decline, it may not be any more. Opportunity to work on large-scale products.
Cons: For senior folks, it's hard to find projects with good scope.
The company had layoffs. Even for people left behind, the morale is down, and indications are more people will either be managed out or leave on their own. Meta is not growing but is shrinking.
They still suffer significantly from being short-term impact driven in the PSC process. They've been trying to change this for years, even removing "Move Fast / Break Things" and replacing it with "Long term." The problem is most of the folks in calibration and running the show still have short-term impact in their DNA, as that's the way they measure everything.
Mark is very fixated on the metaverse as a "bet the company" initiative. The problem is that he is spending so much on it, and the likely timeframe when it goes mainstream is still years out. Also, the ads business is in trouble with the economy in decline and headwinds from Apple's privacy changes. They basically need to rewrite the ads stack, which will take a long time, and revenue will suffer in the meantime.
- 5.0Good Pay, Skip The TestsSoftware Engineer • Current EmployeeMenlo Park, California, United StatesOctober 18, 2021Pros: Good pay. Work is reasonable. Don't need to write tests.Cons: No free food WFH now.
- 2.0Good for fresh grads who can sell their soulSoftware Engineer • Current EmployeeMenlo Park, California, United StatesOctober 5, 2019Pros: Lot of perks that a fresh grad would care for. Food is awesome. Good medical and 401k benefits, maybe a bit better than most companies. Fast promotion if you can work long hours. Fast-paced environment; you'll get to learn new stuff all the time. Lot of smart engineers around.Cons: With fast promotion comes fast firing. It's an "up or out" policy up to a certain level. Not a good place for senior engineers joining. Too much stress in the team, driven by performance reviews, which are the most aggressive that I've ever known. Emphasis is on individual impact, due to which there's a lot of distrust within the team. No stack ranking, but a curve is implemented at the org level. This is not a big deal in other companies, but here it means 'out'. Managers' main job is to write performance reviews, and this often leads to micromanagement that can be extremely frustrating to senior engineers. There's a lot of work duplication. Most managers (even directors) ignore it as performance reviews are all about impact. Most engineers know that everyone wants to write code and make impact, so they ignore the code duplication. Some teams are hiring just for the headcount, with not much impactful work. This becomes a problem for senior engineers, as they have to invent work or get out. Before joining a team, check out their roadmap for at least a year. This is a good place if you want to make money at the cost of WLB. Not a place to be innovative, which inherently carries risk and takes time. It's a risk because if there's no impact, you'll be fired. Most of the engineers work to satisfy performance reviews. My work is determined, keeping performance reviews as the guideline. But the company will be fine; there are a lot of good engineers capable of quickly delivering a fix or hacking a feature.
- 3.0The company is on the declineSoftware Engineer • Current EmployeeMenlo Park, California, United StatesDecember 14, 2022Pros: Benefits are great, although they may go down now that they are tightening their belts. Great compensation, although with the stock price decline, it may not be any more. Opportunity to work on large-scale products.Cons: For senior folks, it's hard to find projects with good scope. The company had layoffs. Even for people left behind, the morale is down, and indications are more people will either be managed out or leave on their own. Meta is not growing but is shrinking. They still suffer significantly from being short-term impact driven in the PSC process. They've been trying to change this for years, even removing "Move Fast / Break Things" and replacing it with "Long term." The problem is most of the folks in calibration and running the show still have short-term impact in their DNA, as that's the way they measure everything. Mark is very fixated on the metaverse as a "bet the company" initiative. The problem is that he is spending so much on it, and the likely timeframe when it goes mainstream is still years out. Also, the ads business is in trouble with the economy in decline and headwinds from Apple's privacy changes. They basically need to rewrite the ads stack, which will take a long time, and revenue will suffer in the meantime.
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