Status: 4.5 YOE
Current Position: Technical Consultant at a consulting firm
Location: Interviewed for Meta London/Zurich
Date: Feb 2022
Signed an NDA so won't be sharing exact questions but trying to give back to the community as much as I can! Loved reading these while I was preparing so why not.
Recruiter reached out to me in Dec 2021. I scheduled a phone screen for Jan 2022 as I wanted the time during the holidays to prepare.
Phone Screen 35-40 mins
Interviewer introduced himself, explained the structure of the interview and jumped straight into the questions. Overall he was very friendly, and made me feel comfortable as I very visibly nervous. He said he'll ask 2 questions and I was expected to solve them within 15 mins each.
- Matrix related question, not on LC. Equivalent to LC-easy. It was a simple matrix traversal question, but what caught me off gaurd was, he asked me to print the values instead of storing in a List and returning the values, so my solution had to be "actual" constant space. After few hints I was able to solve it.
- Array related question, not on LC. Equivalent to LC-easy/medium. Two pointer approach. I missed the entire scenario of array containing negative numbers, which the interviewer pointed out after I had finished coding and doing a couple dry runs. I corrected it, but while doing a dry run for the same, instead of taking a non-decreasing array as my test case, I got nervous and took a non-increasing array which obviously did not work with my solution. Interviewer asked me to maybe try out with a seperate test case, but it was too late so he decided to stop the interview.
My LC stats till the phone interview were about 120 questions, most of them easy and medium, and about 1-2 hards. I focused on fb tagged and the daily challenges as well as contests, skipping dp. Before december, I had no LC/competitive programming experience, I remember the day after the recruiter call I was struggling to figure out how binary search worked. I do have a CS degree, but haven't practiced DS/Algo since uni.
Recruiter reached out to me the following day saying I had cleared the phone screen (which I had not expected). He said the evaluation was mixed but the interviewer said I was quick to catch up on hints and explained my approach properly.
Scheduled my onsite for Feb 2022 as I needed more time to prepare. I had absolutely zero knowledge of systems design, having never worked on large scale systems or microservices. My current role is mostly POCs and client side programming. I also had 2 SD interviews, the generic one and an in-domain one.
Since everyone including the recruiter and a friend who works at Meta, suggested G##king, I got it but it was too difficult as a beginner to grasp. I moved to Gaurav Sen's videos (great guy, recommended for beginners), which cleared most of my basics, then read Alex Xu's book, the first 2 parts of DDIA, some InfoQ videos. I was most nervous about System Design since no matter how much I study I still had no practical exp. The best part was watching Jackson Gabbard's video on System Design, which I watched twice a week till the interview to keep me motivated lol.
Onsite
In domain system design The recruiter said the flow would be similar to a regular SD interview but with a different question. The interviewer was extremely friendly and helped me whenever I needed nudging. Overall I dont think i said enough to drive the conversation as we were pretty much done by 20-25 minutes. The interviewer then asked me how I would integrate certain oculus functionalities in the network architechture.
Self assessment - hire
system design From G##king. The lack of exp clearly showed, I was extremely nervous and confused. I did not cover tradeoffs, most of the coversation was on the database. Come to think of it, I did not even list the non functional requirements. The interviewer was friendly.
Self assessment - lean no hire
behavioral Regular questions about past teams/projects. I have no idea how I did. I definitely did not do as per IC5 standards since I have no experience mentoring juniors or managing them. Dont be nervous when they type too much while taking notes, its probably for the best.
Self assessment - hire
coding 1 The interviewer was one of the best people I have ever talked to! I think this was the only interview I wasn't extremely nervous because of the interviewer. Both the questions were straight out Fb top 50, LC medium, the example test case was the same as well. Had solved them a long time ago. Could come up with a linear solution for the first question, for the follow up he asked me how I could improve when it hit me that I could use binary search of it :(.
Self assessment - hire
coding 2 The interviewer looked kind of bored (wasnt rude or anything, still had a great experience). Again both questions were fb top 50, LC medium. Solved the first one easily. For the second question, I proposed a nlogn solution, but he kept hinting towards quickselect (i got that after 5 minutes of him asking me how I could improve this). I told him I do know about the algorithm, but dont know how to implement, so he asked me to implement my nlogn solution and that was it.
Self assessment - hire
Overall, all the interviewers, the recruiters, the coordinators, one of the interviews had a shadow interviewer as well, all of them were extremely nice and helpful. Be sure to prepare answers for the behavioral. Be sure to think of questions to ask your interviewers in the last 5 minutes, I asked the same very specific question about meta culture to all 5, and since all of them had varying exps, I got interesting answers. I am expecting a reject for now but it was such a fun experience.
All the best to everyone reading this and preparing. Hope we all get to work together in the future! Feel free to ask any questions in the comments, I will answer them as long as I am not violating my NDA.
Will continue the prepartion and reapply again :D. Its amazing how I was struggling to implement a binary search 3 months ago and now I can easily solve3/4 questions in the LC contests. Practice is the key!
Current LC stats: Total: 320. Easy:125. Medium: 184. Hard:11
Update: I got an offer. Clearly I underestimated myself lol. For people curious about the timelline after onsite: (because I was a nervous wreak for 2 weeks)
3 days after onsite, I got a call from the recruiter saying my feedback was mixed, mainly because of the design round. I proposed doing a redo of the round, but he suggested taking it to the hiring committee and said I should be hearing from him in a week. After a week he called me again, and said it would take some more time. After 3-4 days, I got the call saying I got an offer! Still figuring out team matching, compensation and location, dont have the level information either, but overall feeling pretty good. Will keep this thread updated.
I think even though I was disappointed by my performance in the SD round, I had an indomain system round which really worked out in my favor. It is something I do everyday as a part of my job and I genuinely enjoy doing it and it must have come across as such. Would be happy to answer more questions and good luck all! And thank you Leetcode!
Update: Ended up taking a role with a Zurich team. Comp. details https://leetcode.com/discuss/compensation/1941669/Meta-or-IC4-or-Zurich-CH