Recruiter Screen
Questions: General screening questions, was asked how much time I wanted to prepare and asked for two weeks even though recruiter suggested to take more time.
Candidate's Approach
No approach provided.
Interviewer's Feedback
No feedback provided.
Phone Screen
Questions:
- Range Sum of BST - recursive solution was accepted.
- Dot Product of Two Sparse Vectors - came up with a similar solution to approach 3 and was accepted.
Interviewer did not ask for complexities but I brought them up right before ending the call.
Candidate's Approach
No approach provided.
Interviewer's Feedback
No feedback provided.
Onsite
Questions:
- Add Strings - similar to this one but with decimal points; took me longer than it should have.
- Shortest Path in Binary Matrix - suggested BFS solution with a deque and was told to implement it; unfortunately I ran out of time missing one or two lines to complete the solution.
- Strobogrammatic Number - came up with two pointer solution.
- Meta Phone Screen Questions - coded a solution that traversed departing array from right to left while keeping the minimum of the returning one as well as calculating the min cost.
- System design (architecture): design a search system for an existing platform like threads / twitter.
- Behavioral - typical behavioral questions; make sure to have several stories prepared that follow the STAR method. Interviewer requested to keep my answers around my most recent position.
Candidate's Approach
No approach provided.
Interviewer's Feedback
No feedback provided.
The whole process took about five weeks from recruiter reaching through LinkedIn all the way up to rejection email. The onsite itself was not hard at all but I focused too much around studying LeetCode problems and spent very little time around system design and preparing for behavioral questions. On to the next one.