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Meta | E5 | Infra | London | July | Passed

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Hi,

This forum has helped me a lot, so giving back to the community.

Preparation Phase
I picked up leetcode after a year and half in May. I only targetted Meta, so started doing top 100 meta tagged questions on leetcode. I took my time to understand the problems. I tried solving problems on my own first and then went through editorials. It took me 2 months to go through top 100 problems. I was practicing in the evening after office hours and spent 6-7 hours/day on weekends.
When I was done with 100 problems, I got myself referred. Soon after, I scheduled my screening interview.

Screening Round
I scheduled my screening round after 2 weeks. During those 2 weeks, I solved top 50 using stopwatch. I tried doing every question under 20 minutes. I was asked one easy and one medium question. Both of them were from top 50 meta tagged questions.

Loop Interviews
For loop interviews, I took 4 weeks to prep. I scheduled all interviews on same day(might not be best strategy).

During these 4 weeks, I split my time between prepping for coding rounds and system design.

For coding rounds, I completed top 100 meta tagged questions using stopwatch targetting to solve them under 20 minutes.

For system design, I read few chapters from "designing data intensive applications", watched youtube videos of "Jordan has no life", and practiced all problems listed on "Hello Interview". I asked my friends to take my mock interviews for system design. I also read white paper shared by recruiter on TAO Facebook.

For behavioral interview, I got sampe list of questions from recruiter. I only practiced those questions. I only spent one weekend on this. For each question, I thought about my personal scenarios, then I wrote them on a word doc. I ran it through ChatGPT to make it into STAR format. Then, I practiced reading these out aloud multiple times.

  1. Behavioral Interview:
    I was asked questions from the list provided or some variations of those. Practicing the answers helped here. In my case, interviewer did not react much. He was just writing notes on paper. I had all scenarios in my head so I was able to sail through easily.

  2. System Design:
    I was asked to design top k youtube videos. It is a standard question listed on hello interview. I found this round a bit difficult. It is not just about knowing the right answer. It is also about tuning in with interviewer. Trying to gauge which parts interviewer wants to focus on. In my case, interviewer wanted me to quickly go through HLD and talk about deep dives. I highly recommend going through "Hello Interview" site. Cover all the system design questions on that. I followed below pattern for this round:
    a. functional requirement (1-2 min)
    b. non functional requirement (2-3 min)
    c. core entities (1 min)
    d. APIs (1 mins)
    e. HLD (10 mins)
    f. Deep dives (20 mins)
    At the end of this interview, I did not feel I did well. I lost hope as I forgot most of the points I had studied for deep dives. I even asked interviewer to give me 1 minute to think about a question he asked and still could not come up with right answer. In the end, I was lucky that I passed this round.

  3. Coding Round:
    Again, I was asked 2 medium questions from top 50 meta tagged.

  4. Coding Round
    Again, 2 medium questions from top 100 meta tagged questions.

Bottom Line:

  1. Coding: Practice top 100 meta tagged questions with stop watch. Focus on solving under 20 minutes. If you cannot solve under 20 minutes, you are not ready.
  2. System Design: Practice all system design questions on Hello Interview site. Make a plan to go through topics. It is very easy to get lost in topics. Use your time wisely, at the end you should be able to solve the problems, you don't need to do PhD in these topics. Redis & ElasticSearch are your friends.
  3. Behavioral: Give one weekend to this. Prepare answers from your own experiences. If you don't have such experience, think how your co-workers reacted or how you should have reacted in certain scenarios. It makes it easy during interview. Interviewer will try to grill you to validate what you are saying is true or not. If it is your own experience, you will be able to do it. STAR method is your friend.

Timeline
I got result of screening round within 2 business days. I got result of loop interviews within 4 business days.

Thanks

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