Meta | E4 Infra Onsite

Hello community,

This community has been a great help to me, so I wanted to give back by sharing my experience.

Background: YOP: 3 years, Location: USA. I was contacted by a recruiter in January 2024. The first coding round was scheduled for February 20th.

Mock Interview (February 13th):

Given an integer array nums, return all the triplets
Given a string containing digits from 2-9 inclusive, return all possible letter combinations that the number could represent
I was nervous, but the interviewer was very friendly. It was a two-way discussion that boosted my confidence. I wrote somewhat complicated code but explained it well. The interviewer asked for some improvements in problem-solving.
First Coding Round (February 20th):

Given an array of integers nums and an integer k, return the total number of subarrays whose sum equals to k
Copy graph
I felt very confident, answered all the questions well, and maintained good communication. The interviewer asked follow-up questions about the "Clone Graph," such as what if all the nodes are not connected. I’m not sure if he fully understood my explanations. We ran out of time, and he asked me to stop, but overall, I was confident I would move to the next round.
Long Wait: The recruiter handling my application went on leave, and after following up for more than 25 days, someone finally replied. They connected my application to another recruiter who said my performance was good and that they would like to proceed. This call happened in the third week of March.

Virtual Onsite (April 24th and 25th):

April 24th:

Behavioral:

Discuss a setback and how you overcame it.
Describe a time you faced obstacles and how you prioritized.
Share a time when you lacked complete information about a technical problem and its resolution.
Describe constructive feedback you received and how you implemented it.
Coding:

Given binary search tree and 2 numbers, find all the sum between these two numbers
Given an array of points, find k closest points to the Origin
The behavioral round went well with a responsive and upbeat interviewer. In the coding round, I discussed all the solutions along with their time complexities and felt positive about the next day's interview.
April 25th:

Coding:

Valley in an array
Large Island
System Design: Design a messaging application.

The coding round started with the interviewer rushing me to code the brute force solution for the first question. Even after I explained the optimal solution, he insisted on seeing the brute force version. The next question was a surprise, and although I knew a solution using DFU, the interviewer didn't allow it. I came up with another solution, but only coded the main part due to time constraints.

System Design Round: I arrived late and felt I didn't adequately communicate everything within the 35 minutes allocated. The interviewer also ran out of time for questions. I was disappointed with this round but still hopeful.

Follow-up: Eight days later, the recruiter informed me that they needed more information from the design round and scheduled another follow-up. I was better prepared and confident this time.

Virtual Follow-up (May 15th): Design something similar to Instagram reels.

The interviewer joined the call 20 minutes late and soon after said we had only 10 minutes left, then extended it by another 10 minutes. Despite the pressure, I explained things well, unlike my SD round on the 25th. However, the interviewer seemed distracted and didn’t ask many questions, though I checked regularly if he was following along.

Two days later, I was told the feedback was mixed and awaited the Engineering team's final decision. All attempts to follow up were ignored, and on May 30th, the recruiter finally responded, unfortunately deciding not to proceed with my application. I requested constructive feedback but received no response.

Learning Experience: Overall, I learned a lot from this interview process. The second recruiter was very responsive and helpful until the end.

Resources: For the coding rounds, tackling the top 200 Facebook questions on LeetCode should suffice. For system design, I referred to Alex Xu's system design books and the Design Guru course. Several Medium articles also helped and hellointeview articles.

Finally, I would like to thank everyone in this discussion section for sharing their experiences and questions. I would wish all the very best for all the interview takers in future.