Meta | E5 | Offer | Menlo Park

EDIT: I noticed there has been some interest in other details from my interview experience, hence I have added a bunch of details for questions posted in comments and otherwise. Hope this helps people.

Hey all, giving back to the community as this forum has helped me a lot in my preparations.

Background YOE: 16 years of experience - 8 years consulting, 8 years at FAANG+.

I got reached out by a Meta recruiter and scheduled a phone interview.

Approach to prepare I have prepared for interviews before. Things have changed significantly since.
This time around though, I had to improvise. Time was my friend and enemy at the same time.

I used to pick one topic per week. Directly start with watching the problem video solution, then I'd implement its Java version on .

Phone interview

1. Pow(x, n)
2. Minimum Remove to Make Valid Parentheses

Coding interview 1:

1. Merge 3 sorted arrays (given with duplicates) by removing duplicates. I came up with a function to merge 2 sorted arrays and called it twice. I think I did ok-ish in the question.

2. Binary Tree Vertical Order Traversal This is a frequently asked question at Meta. I was able to explain approach, complexities and code it in under 7 mins.

Coding interview 2:

1. Remove Duplicates from Sorted Array Straight forward question. I was able to explain approach, time and space complexities and we moved on to second question in 7 mins.

2. Making A Large Island We discussed the approach for 10-15 mins. Interviewer was super helpful in providing hints and guiding me. I was able to code a solution with an inverted approach - look for 0, convert it to 1 and calculate islandArea by keeping track of maxArea for result. This approach works but it isn't efficient. Interviewer seemed happy with the solution.

I knew that behavioral and system design rounds will decide E5 vs E6, so I invested my time equally to prepare for these 2 rounds well.

Behavioral All the questions were of the theme, "Tell me about a time when..." and they were mostly about gauging how I handled conflict, ambiguity, uncertainty and setbacks.

Tip:

1. If you prepare your answers, create a matrix of "most challenging, hardest bug, conflicts and learning" for each company that your worked for. Do this once and you should be good with any of the behavioral interviews at FAANG+ companies.
2. Know 2 or 3 features/projects in great details, explain it to yourself, rehearse them over and over again until you feel confident on answering anything relating to that work.

System Design

• Design Top 10 songs for each user on Spotify

I implemented something similar to the solution found online.

I have to admit, is a relatively newer resource out there for System Design prep but it has got great quality content. Highly recommend.

Note: One advise I'd like to give is that don't overwhelm yourself with so many resources out there nowadays for tech interview preparations. I did the same mistake and course corrected myself upon realizing it.

Resources I used:

1. Youtube premium
2. www.neetcode.io
3. www.hellointerview.com for System Design

Good luck to who is reading this. You got this!

PS: If you came this far to read, I can sense that you must be in a "grind mode" and I completely empathize with you. Managing work and preparing for interviews wasn't easy for me. I spent about 3 hours on avg for 3 months (10 pm - 1 am) including weekends. But I understand this is what you got to do to get into FAANG+ companies. I am sharing this detail just to assure you that control the controllable and leave rest up to your luck. Good luck.