Hello Everyone,

I am briefly sharing my interview experience here. Please bear with me as I'm sharing a little old interview experience. I always wanted to share something and give back to the community, but I was little occupied with personal things.

My interview happened during July-Aug 2021.

Background

Education: B.tech, Tier-3 College
Experience: 5 YOE (MNC and Startup) (2016 passout)

Round 1 (Telephonic Round) (45 mins)

• Questions
  • Find lowest common ancestor in 'n' ary tree .
  • Given an array, find if there exists a triplet (a, b,c) such that a^2 + b^2 = c^2 .
• Experience
  • I solved both problems optimally under 35 mins with clean code and explanation.

Round 2 (45 mins)

• Questions
  • You are given two non-empty linked lists with digits are stored in reverse order (including negative numbers), and each of their nodes contains a single digit or (+/-) signs. Add the two numbers and return the sum as a linked list.
  • Given a string, compress the string as optimal as possible by removing the consecutive characters if 3 or more consecutive characters . This is like a candy crush game !
    • Eg : Input : "aabbbbac", output will be "c" .
      • First, you can remove all the "bbbb", then string turns to be "aaac".
      • Then, "aaac" turns to be "c" .
• Experience
  • I solved both problems optimally under 45 mins with clean code and explanation. Second question has some edge cases, but came up with a tricky approach and convinced the interviewer.

Round 3 (45 mins)

• Questions
  • Given a string and sort order, sort the string based on the sort order.
    • Input : { "string" : "babbac", "sort_order" : "bca"}
    • Output : "bbbcaa"
  • Variation of Kth Largest Element in given array.
• Experience
  • I solved both the problems optimally, personally, I'd say any person who is giving interviews would expect like 3rd round, simple and straightforward.

Round 4 (45 mins) (Behavioral Interview)

• Questions
  • Briefly tell me one project in your past experience which you're so proud about and take pride in sharing with others.
    • What are the challenges ? both technically and non-technically ?
    • How did you manage your timelines ?
    • What one thing you'd want to correct now if you've a choice now ?
  • Have you solved any production issues in the past ?
  • How do you plan ahead when you need to onboard someone new to your team ?
  • Have you ever tried to go out of your comfort zone ?
  • What is the most sexiest tech challenge you've solved ever ? - *same words, though it is subjective, but it is what it is !!
• Experience
  • I reasonably answered all the questions with sheer openess & shared my real experience without cooking something just for the sake in the interview.
  • Last question was really tricky one as the person who is interviewing me is from Facebook (as we all know scale and challenges are so unique in FAANG), but I fortunately got to work in one of the challenging systems in e-commerce and tried explaining about a challenge which I solved. He was so impressed with the answer. I was just lucky there !

Round 5 (45 mins) (Behavioral Interview)

• Questions
  • Design online judge system, like leetcode.
• Experience

  • I reasonably did well and managed to answer all the follow up questions/trade-off questions in the interview.

  • Attaching the screenshot of the design I did exactly in the interview. I've still have the screenshot with me.

    

Overall, I had a great interview experience with Facebook. Thank you Facebook for making sure interview experience is smooth and clean.

What happened after all the interviews ?

Recruiter reached out to me after 1 week and confirmed that "Facebook is extending an offer!". Once again, thank you to Facebook and recruiters.

Last but not the least, thanks to the entire leetcode community and fellow friends for helping me in levelling up my skills. Million Love & Thanks to all of you!

I sincerely wish everyone of you to turn your dreams true. Take care everyone !

P.S - It was FACEBOOK then, now it's META :)