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META | E4 | SFO | Oct 2024 [Reject]

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Meta Interview Process for E4 SDE

Applied through referral, got email to connect with recruiter in next 2 days.
Phone call with recruiter lasted around 10minutes telephonic conversation

  • Discussed about favorite project
  • Scope of work
  • Day to day activities
  • Spoke about interview process
  • Asked for 2 weeks before attempting to schedule screening interview

Coding Screening Round
45 minutes
Didnt spend more than a minute in introductions and went straight to coding.

  1. Separate odd and even integers, place odd integers in first part of array, followed by even integers.
    -Clarified requirements and edge cases like length of array, null or empty array
    -Explained my approach on how to handle it in optimized way
    -Coded quickly, completed dry run and discussed if solution solves edge cases

  2. Sum of root to leaf values in binary tree and represent in array
    -same way as above

Feedback-
strong communication
missed edge case like negative number in 1st question and integer overflow
Interviewer expected me to come up with all edge cases by myself
Cleared and moved to onsite

Connected with technical recruiter on 60min call
He explained everything in detail about what to expect in each round for onsite
Took 30 days to finally attempt onsite interviews splitted in 2 days (also spread over 2 weeks)

Onsite-

  1. Coding Round1-
    Closest element to target in BST (return any closest not necessary to return smallest node)
    -followed same approach as code screening round
    Mistake- took a very long example for dry run and wasted time - took around 25 minutes to finish it

Given a m*n binary array where value 1 represents blockage, 0 represents empty cell
Find the path from source(0,0) to target(m-1,n-1)
Mistake- Confused if it had to be shortest path, explained bfs approach
But interviewer corrected me that it can be any path so I changed to dfs approach
I chose iterative dfs.. spent a lot of time to code the solution as iterative is lengthier than recursive and focused on code modularity so wasted time there
At the end had to reverse the path and return result
Interviewer was not getting why I had to flip the path, expalined it ...althiough I feel he had no clarity yet
Begged for 1 more minute at end and completed writing the solution
Went through 2 edge cases and wrote TC and SC
No time to dry run

  1. Coding round 2-
    K closest points from origin
    Explained approach.. went for minHeap
    Discussed edge cases and got questions like why selected minHeap
    Whats the TC, SC if I would have chosen maxHeap
    How to implement maxHeap in java in O(n) - Interviewer mentioned he recently got to know it can be done in O(n)
    I said its nice that such way exists will research later and just wanted to move to next question quickly

Dot product of vectors
Followup- what of one vector is sparse
What will I use to optimize
Discussed map and arraylist solutions
Binary search as well
Had time left so also wrote interface to define sparse vector

  1. System design
    Online coding platform that shows leaderboard
    Went for helloInterview solution
    But interviewer was not satisfied with NoSQL DynamoDB and asked multiple followups on how schema should be defined
    Invested 10 minutes on this part itself
    Had last 5 min left and still had not reached to how will I design actual leaderboard
    So jumped to that quickly
    Went for redis sorted set
    Followup- how will it scale

  2. Behavioral
    Discussed about project in detail
    got asked about how many lines of actual code did I write in that 5 months long project
    Conflict with Colleague
    Conflict with Manager
    I explained that I have people manager so explained non tech example of conflict

Got rejection in 2 weeks and no feedback

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