I just had my phone/video screen with an engineer at Meta. I was asked two questions. The first question was tricky and nothing like what one would expect from the interview prep material provided by facebook. I feel like this is set up to fail the candidate (see below for details). The second question was more standard - recursion/iteration solution to visit and process nodes and return a result - nothing too complex but nothing like what is in the LC top 100 questions.

The first question that was tricky was about a custom object comparator that already exists as a black box. The question said that this comparator has a flow and it sometimes gives the wrong answer. For example the function would return, a > b, b > c, c > a. Yes or No, can this function return the max element among several elements?

I found this super tricky because I thought there may be a way to use the comparator to get the max element. After discussing with interviewer, we came to the conclusion that there is no way unless we are comparing only two elements - so neither Yes nor No as it was asked in the question. Wrote two nested loops to compare each element with other to see if there is a max or not. I think the question was very odd!

What do you all think? I emailed to tell my recruiter about this, Should I make a stronger complaint to the recruiter or is the question perfectly acceptable by Meta? The interviewer was also a few minutes late and his microphone was not working so he had to reconnect after several tries so that took a good 5-10 minutes out of our time. The whole experience was really disappointing.