Facebook came to my campus career fair, where I turned in my resume. I had an on-site interview in New York, which went well.

It was a completely technical interview with only programming. I was asked two questions:

• The first was a simple reverse a signed integer.
• The second was a harder pattern matching problem that could be solved using a prefix tree.

I was invited to a second on-site interview in Menlo Park. It was a long flight across the country and, in hindsight, totally not worth the time wasted. I skipped classes and turned in homework late as a result.

The on-site was awful. My interviewer showed up late and then proceeded to ask me a very simple question about printing the paths to nodes in a binary tree. I coded it up with some minor corrections (since I was whiteboarding and you miss some stuff when your face is glued to a wall).

He then extended the question but cut me off because we ran out of time (this was completely his fault, since he showed up a good 15 minutes late).

They proceeded to give me a tour of the campus and talk with current engineers. It would have been fun if it hadn't been for the bad interview.

Overall, I got the feeling that they're a large company and are definitely not as agile as they were a couple of years ago. Engineers were very complacent and talked more about their great perks than personal growth.

In the end, I think I got caught in the interview anti-loop and had some poor luck. I was promptly rejected.

I really wish I hadn't wasted 48 hours flying for that sad excuse of an interview.

The pattern matching question in my first interview was reasonably tricky, but the interviewer did a fantastic job of giving me the right clues to help me solve it on my own.