Status: University Student at my last year of university
Yoe: 6 months of internships
Position: University Grad Role at Meta (London Office)
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Phone screen round had 2 coding questions:
- Given an array of integers, determine how many monotonic sequences the array is built of.
- Merge K Sorted Lists (But Simplified): https://leetcode.com/problems/merge-k-sorted-lists/
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Behavioural Round:
- Time when you worked with a challenging person
- Time when you received negative feedback
- Time when you had little time to finish a job
- Time when you had a conflict with a colleague
- and more similar behavioural questions...
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Coding Round 1:
- https://leetcode.com/problems/minimum-add-to-make-parentheses-valid/ I was able to explain my approach & code for both questions with some extra time. Interviewer asked very strange questions after I finished, like what is contained in the stack I was using ???
- https://leetcode.com/problems/simplify-path/ . Struggled a bit to solve it, but I was given a hint to use a stack and manage to code it (but didn't have much time to do verification)
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Coding Round 2: This was by far the hardest interview I ever had. I was told I was only gonna get medium questions, but only got hard ones.
- https://leetcode.com/problems/convert-binary-search-tree-to-sorted-doubly-linked-list/ I had never seen this problem in my life, interviewer kept telling me that there was something I wasn't considering, but his hints were always the same and it wasn't helpful. I couldn't solve it.
- https://leetcode.com/problems/design-skiplist/ Only asked for the search function. I had no idea why this kind of data structure would exist. I managed to explain and code a binary search solution for the search function but didn't have time to validate the solution.
All in all, I feel like all the interviews except for the last one were normal. However, I was told during the process by the recruiter that I was only gonna get medium questions and maybe easy ones, and as you could notice I got only hard ones on the last interview. I think it might be because my last interviewer was very senior and had a lot of experience (I think he even wrote a book about infrastructure ???), but I mean, it's an University Grad role, I've seen E5 with easier questions.
I would say that I did excelent in the behavioural interview. I have very strong speaking skills and was able to empathize with the interviewer. Also, I was about average in the second one. Probably the reason I wasn't hired was because of the last interview, or at least that's what I think. I also noticed that all my interviewers were specialized or had worked in infrastructure, and I mentioned from the beginning that I liked web, and app development, so maybe the profile they were looking for was not a match.