My Meta Interview Experience

Giving Back to the Community

Mock Interview

Questions:

• Count and Say
• Phone Number Combinations

Outcome: Solved on time.

Phone Screen

Questions:

• Merge Intervals
• Kth Largest Element in an Array
• Kth Missing Positive Number

Outcome: Solved all. Heard back within a week and moved on to onsite in June.

Onsite Interview

Coding Round 1

Questions:

• Given a list of numbers (0-9), arrange the numbers to form the second greatest number.
• Random Pick with Weight variation related to citySelector.

Outcome: Solved both.

Coding Round 2

Questions:

• Given a string "abaacbcc" and an order string "abc", arrange the characters of the given string based on the order string. Expected output: "aaabbccc". Used a HashMap approach.
• Minimum Remove to Make Valid Parentheses.

Outcome:

• Interviewer introduced himself and asked for my introduction, which took 5 minutes.
• Solved the first question within 10 minutes. The interviewer kept asking follow-up questions about corner cases, which took 25 minutes. I was asked for implementation details during this time.
• The second question was given with 5 minutes left. I had solved this problem before but wasn't allowed to write the code. Instead, I was asked to dry run it on an example, which I did quickly using a stack solution.
• Felt like the interviewer wanted to reject me. Any thoughts?

Behavioral Round

Questions: Standard behavioral questions such as "Why Meta?", favorite project, dealing with a difficult colleague, etc.

Outcome: Did well.

System Design Round

Question: Design a scalable system for a hacker who hacked 10^9 computers to download pages from example.com.

Outcome: I gave two different approaches. Interviewer seemed to be satisfied.

I haven't heard back yet. It seems like it might be a rejection.