Finished my virtual onsite last week, still waiting to hear back. Was exactly what you would expect/what you are told by your recruiter
Phone Interview
- LC Easy
- LC Medium
I only got half way through the second question. Due to technical dificulties I started 10 minutes late so only had 30 minutes for both. Passed anyway.
Virtual Onsite
First Interview
- LC Hard that didn't ever do it before so maybe took a bit longer, still got it. Was a top sort problem.
- One I'd never seen before but brute force was O(N^4), optimal I got the day after would be to use a suffix tree for O(N), what I wrote was O(N^2). Really hard problem IMO.
Second Interview
- LC Medium. Was a generic problem needing a heap so while I never did this before it was easy.
- LC Hard. I got stuck hard here. Brute force could be O(N^3). I didn't even consider it becaise I mentioned sorting could sove it in O(n log n) but didn't code it. In my head if sorting was that obvious I could do better. Eventually got the idea for an O(N) algorithm but didn't write code. If I fail, in my head this will be why. No real category to the problem, was just a kind of generic thing needing a dictionary.
Third Interview
Behavior questions. Spent the whole time on them, didn't get to code. To me that is a good thing because I would imagine after E4 they're expecting someone who has depth to their answers but who knows.
Fourth Interview
System/Product design. I got pretty tripped up here. I was coming in prepared for a full system design (sharding, replication, db choices, etc) but the conversation went more to product design and how the parts would work together. Doing it with the virtual whiteboard worked but wasn't ideal.
Prep
Nothing special really. I did have premium for a bit but that was just to have more questions open to me, didn't really target Facebook tagged questions. Many problems I didn't actually even do, just thought about what may or may not work and the read solution/youtube videos if I was really stuck. My profile shows 81 easy, 82 medium, and 14 hard solved or 177 total.
My thoughts
Now seeing that for coding I got three hard and one medium I feel good in what I was able to do but personally I don't know if it's enough. Not finishing a question and in my head, not really understaning what the goal of the produt design interview, will cost me.
To save people time
I won't share actual questions for the onsite. I just now found all four coding on LC but I hadn't done them before. IMO unless you're only targeting Facebook your time is better off just practicing and understanding why solutions are used when instead of rote memorization. For example, my Google onsite was all questions not from LC and I pass HC for that and am also pending SVP there.
UPDATE
Got an E4 offer but also the option to do one more system design round since I was close to E5 so I took that route instead. Will update this post after that interview (and again when this is all done).
Follow up interviews
Coding
- LC medium with lots of follow ups. Not going to bother to check if this was on LC, it was straight forward and involved multiple iterations of binary search.
- LC medium. Of of those questions where you have to use an API/function call. N^2 solution was obvious, eventually got O(N) but took maybe too many hints. We'll see.
Product Architecture
I've never read grocking but I assume this is a textbook question for it. I liked it a lot more than my first one because it was more straightforward in what needed to be built. I felt like I showed my best self there. If it's not enough then it's not enough, I ccouldn't have done better.
One final update will happen when I hear results.
Final update
Got offer for E5.