Software Engineer · Phone Screen · Coding

Meta — Software Engineer

Level: Unknown Level

Round: Phone Screen · Type: Coding · Difficulty: 6/10 · Duration: 60 min · Interviewer: Neutral

Topics: Algorithms

Location: Menlo Park, CA

Interview date: 2026-01-18

Summary

I had a technical phone interview with a very nice interviewer.

Question: Implement the Linux cd command given the current working directory. Also, merge intervals.

Details

The interview consisted of two coding questions. The first was to implement the Linux cd command given the current working directory. The second question was merge intervals.

My approach to the first question:

1. I parsed the input path to handle relative and absolute paths.
2. I maintained a stack to represent the directory structure.
3. I handled edge cases like . (current directory) and .. (parent directory).

My approach to the second question:

1. I sorted the intervals by their start times.
2. I iterated through the sorted intervals, merging overlapping intervals.
3. I created a new list to store the merged intervals.

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