- Basic Calculator II with only + and *
- https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/124616/
For 1, I was initially describing the O(n) space stack solution expecting to be asked to give O(1) space solution but surprisingly he just asked me to code it up and didn't ask to do better.
2 has solutions on that thread, recommend you do it. I encourage you to think of it like merging 2 sorted lists using i and j pointers but with intervals instead.
Had time to dry run 1 test case for each question.
Made sure to ask as many clarifying questions as possible, and give time and space complexities. It's a lot to do considering you have 37-40 mins for 2 questions.
Cracking FAANG says they move you onto onsite if they think you have a 25% chance of passing the onsite. I wonder how true that is. I did my onsite recently and my onsite questions were a lot easier than these. (3 mediums and 1 easy) I will share them after I get my decision.
Prep I did before the phone screen:
- Meta last 6 months / 3 months / explore list and leetcode discuss
- Overall 200+ questions in ~1 month.
- If the question was a more popular one I tried to redo them until I could flawlessly solve them from clarifying questions to dry run in less than 15 mins.
I think the most helpful was manually going through leetcode discuss and getting all the questions over the last year and seeing the most frequent ones. LC discuss gives you the exact variations and sometimes the follow ups that can be asked. You definitely don't have to do 200. I just did it because I already pretty comfortable at leetcode (most of these were Qs I already did in the past so it didn't take long).
I think I found only around ~110 unique questions on leetcode discuss in the last 1 year. I found that 90-95% of the time, they do ask medium difficulty problems (this includes harder easies and easier hards). Very rarely I saw some strange ultra difficult questions. My guess is they have a question bank that they CAN choose from but it's not mandatory, and sometimes interviewers ask their own questions. Sorry if that happens to you.