Today was my first round of phone screening interview with FB singapore. Due to covid situation it was a video interview.

Total Time: 45 min.
Schedule: Interviewer was very nice she finished both of ours intros in first 1 min itself.

• 1 min intro (prepare short intro before to not waste time during interview)
• 42 mins solving 2 questions
• 2 mins at last to ask if have any questions. (prepare before)

first coding question-
https://leetcode.com/problems/minimum-add-to-make-parentheses-valid/

second coding question-
https://leetcode.com/problems/maximum-swap/

My Experience

• Read question very carefully even if you have seen it before. There might be some twist that can lead you to wrong solution. so better read it twice and confirm your understanding with interviewer.
• clarify with interviewer all constraints (size of array, min/max, duplicates, +ve/-ve, null/empty etc)
• take few examples and try to manually solve the question. it will help you get all insight of question, special conditions.
• Think of brute force solution first and explain to interviewer (now you are half way already)
• discuss with interviewer about more optimised solution
• if you are stuck, don't panic. just keep thinking few more mins here there. Don't give up is the key here.
• If you slightly go in correct direction your interviewer might give you some hints, listen them carefully
• Apply hints and think about more optimized solution. explain same and ask if you can code it.
• code it well, talk when you code so if any mistake you can fix some.
• Dry run few tests and fix errors. I had 3-4 errors and fixed them. Interviewer was happy about it.

Key Thing

• Time is the key so target to finish each question with all these steps in 20 mins. Mock few questions everyday to get to this habbit. you will surely improve. Its like Robot thing but we need to do :)
• Interview is not about solving both question in short time successfully. its about process to interect with interviewer, proceed step by step and make it success together with interviewer.

Luckly I got a call today itself about result, I passed it :) would be good weekend ...hehe !!