Meta Interview Process

I went through my Meta Interview process recently. I did prepare myself for 30 days for onsite (not to mention doing daily leetcode challenge which takes a hour of my time daily for last 2 years). Unfortunately my experience has not positive.

My overall feedback is that if you have not seen the problem before, it is really challenging to write an optimal solution in the alloted time.

In two of my coding rounds I wrote the code for both questions asked but didnt give the optimal solution for the second questions. I am going to assume this will certainly bite me as the interviews were touching to discussion to write the code with optimal solution.

In third and last coding round, I just bombed because I did not see either questions before and by the time I actually understood and recognized the pattern (certainly needed help from the interviewer) it was already close to 15 mins. In fact one of the questions I actually did it in leetcode 3 years ago yet I still didnt the pattern :( . For the second question, I didnt need any help from the interviewer but when I was writing the code I couldnt finish due the lack of time. As a result I didnt write a working solution.

My system design interview went ok however again I felt the time was limited to cover all the use cases in details.

Overall my assessment is that if you have seen and recently or recognize the pattern of the problem, you might be able to do it in 15 mins. However if its a new problem and you cannot recognize the problem immediately its not going to happen in 15 mins and will pretty much be screw the the whole interview..