Position: SWE New Grad
Date: March 2020

你好!

I graduated may 2019 but got they reached me out last week for a new grad role.

I recently had the interview with facebook and wanted to share my interview questions.

The first one was the same as this one. https://leetcode.com/problems/word-break/
The second one was similar to this one. https://leetcode.com/problems/merge-k-sorted-lists/

We started directly with the coding and only spoke for 3-5 minutes in the end.
We did not discuss any of my experience/projects/etc...

At the moment, I haven't done neither of the problems.
The first one I got it "relatively" fast (about 15-20 mins) and he told me it was pretty good, so no further optimization was needed.
My approach was a similar to the dynamic programming solution on the problem, but he told it was me to solve recursively and when I got it and fixed a couple of bugs, went to the next one.

The second one, was similar to merge k sorted lists, but it was descending order, and the vector<vector> had already each vector the stories sorted descending, it was with a custom struct, it did get me by surprise because (I don't know if I didn't understand or he wasn't clear enough, but even after I asked several questions, he was very ambiguous) I understood that he wanted me to return the "next" element id within the custom struct. ¿?

struct customstruct{
	int id;
	float score;
	string content;
}
...
[
	[.9, .2],
	[.7, .5]
]
...
.9->.7->.5->.2
// Expected ans was return next ID of the elements in descending order 

I choked a little bit, but I didn't get discouraged/unfocused, and got back on track after I asked him if I could implement it as a function.
I think I did solve the problem, but time ran out, he did praise me over "my vector knowledge and really quick programming abilities", but I think I didn't solved as expected.

I asked a couple of questions in the end, but it seems he already made a choice, so he wasn't very into it.

After waiting for a couple of weeks with no answer, I sent an email to the recruiter.
It was no for me.

Good luck interviwing.