Phone Screen
Questions:
- Palindrome with at most one character removed.
- Merge sorted lists: Coded an nlogn solution, afterward was asked to find a better time solution. After some thinking, I figured out the n+m solution and completed on time.
Candidate's Approach
No approach provided.
Interviewer's Feedback
No feedback provided.
Coding 1
Questions:
- Vertical order traversal of a binary tree (required O(n) space and time solution) -> first coded the nlogn time solution, was asked to optimize, then wrote an O(n) time solution.
- Find the largest island in the grid with at most one 0 flipped to 1.
Candidate's Approach
No approach provided.
Interviewer's Feedback
No feedback provided.
Coding 2
Questions:
- Shortest Path in Binary Matrix: Interviewer did not provide full question, he wanted me to ask clarifying questions like should the path be shortest? Wanted an optimal solution with minimal space complexity. Asked a lot of scenario-based questions after coding, which I answered perfectly.
- Minimum Remove to Make Valid Parentheses (required O(n) space and time solution) -> started coding the O(n) space using stack, but midway explained that I found a better solution and coded O(1) space solution.
Candidate's Approach
No approach provided.
Interviewer's Feedback
No feedback provided.
Product Architecture
Questions: Not available on HelloInterview, but on a similar theme. Very easy if you went over the HelloInterview design questions. Functional requirements were provided by the interviewer with some cases missing and non-functional requirements were added by me. Provided APIs, DAU estimation, went into data schema for a while and jumped into design. The interviewer wanted me to only focus on functional requirements; non-functional were not important unless functional requirements were satisfied completely. During design, there were a lot of back and forth questions about trade-offs, 'why certain tech was used; pros and cons of each'. Then after functional requirements were fully designed, I got a lot of questions again and one deep dive scenario which had a question like "what if certain part of the system gets additional data, now how do you handle duplicates?". I felt like the time was not enough to provide your solution, draw it on Excalidraw, and also answer the interviewer's questions which might not be related to the service you are trying to explain.
Candidate's Approach
My 2 cents would be to get functional requirements designed as accurately and fast as you can. You can expect a lot of questions from the interviewer on functional, non-functional, and deep dives. They want to know every detail and reason behind your decisions.
Interviewer's Feedback
No feedback provided.
Behavioral
Questions: Many questions based on my experience. The interviewer was an Engineering manager with a lot of experience in Meta. He kept asking questions and dove deeper on each of my answers. I didn’t know if the interviewer was satisfied with my responses.
Candidate's Approach
No approach provided.
Interviewer's Feedback
No feedback provided.