Meta E5 | US

YOE: 6
Had onsites last week, wanted to give back to the community :)

Phone interview: https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/4284862/Meta-phone-screen-E4E5

Onside had 4 rounds:

Coding 1:

Not exactly https://leetcode.com/problems/longest-univalue-path/description/ but similar: we also need to return the nodes that exist in the path in order. Struggled in this question, spent 30 mins to figure out the solution and complete coding. Interviewer was silent through out. I realized I had couple of bugs after the interview.
LCA of binary tree with parent pointers: I knew the solution for this question before. Provided and coded the non intuitive O(1) solution. Interviewer also asked me to code the Set approach, as i did not convince why the O(1) solution works properly.

Coding 2:

https://leetcode.com/problems/random-pick-with-weight/description/ : I used binary search and coded it. There was a bug in the code, that interviewer pointed out.
Easier variation of https://leetcode.com/problems/permutations-ii/description/ (has only 2 distinct values) but had a story to the question. Coded the brute force and proudly mentioned we can memoize the answer at an index for optimization. Interviewer mentioned it is useless to memoize and I realized why (facepalm). Also mentioned the wrong Time Complexity which I realized later, but interviewer did not correct me.

System design:

Design a search feature, sorry not disclosing exact details to avoid doxxing myself. Think of indexers in the web crawler design. Like finding out urls of pages which has text that contains certain terms. I clarified requirements, tradeoffs for DB choices, but kind of rushed at the end as I was running out of time. Did not list the APIs at there was no time. I had no idea how this went, but the interviewer was very friendly.

Behavioral:

Standard questions: projects you are proud of, conflicts, failures etc; I felt this went good.

Got a verbal offer couple days after the interview, in team matching right now.

Prep plan: 1 month before the phone screen and 1.5 month before onsite.

Coding: Nothing special, followed what others suggested in leetcode discuss. Thanks to everyone for posting the questions they faced.

Behavioral: Meta prep material is good and had example questions. Spend some time thinking about your past work, and identifying projects to speak about beforehand.

System design: I was most scared about this. I prepped on YouTube and did 5 mock interviews with friends.

I mostly prepared from System Design Fight Club channel. This is a gem ! The organizer does live recordings on various System Design problems. He patiently answers the questions ! I did not attend live, but loved watching the common interview problems from the channel. Only caveat is the videos are a bit lengthy, but I usually watch at 1.5x/1.75x .

I also followed a nice channel jordanhasnolife5163 to understand details on a specific technology.

I split the interviews across 2 days to feel a bit more relaxed b/w interviews.

As you can see, my interview is no where near perfect. It is important to clear your mind after a bad round, and do well in other rounds. All interviews involve an element of luck, so dont be hard on yourself on a reject, some one else would be lucky to have you.