I never thought that I would be posting this but here goes. I passed my Meta E4 On-Site and wanted to give back to the LeetCode community :)
Phonescreen:
- Valid Palindrome 2
- Diameter of Binary Tree
Additional question:
1249. Minimum Remove to Make Valid Parentheses
Only thought process. No code
Behavioral I:
Proud project
Conflict with co-worker
Feedback I've received
Sys Design I
Design a photo messaging app
Some followups that I remember,
Why did I choose SQL over NoSQL?
What is consisten hashing?
How can I scale the system?
What will be the capacity estimates of the system?
Explain the process of how photo or video will be uploaded and downloaded to/from S3?
I thought I had bombed this round since interviewer was driving the whole discussion from start to end and was asking me deep dive questions before I had finished with HLD.I was also specifically asked to calculate estimates.
Coding I
Question 1: 50. Pow(x, n)
Initially I had given a O(N) approach. Coded that. Interviewer wanted O(logN) approach. I fumbled a little bit and took some hints from the interviewer there, but came up with the recursive O(logN) approach.
Question 2: Vertical Order Traversal of a Binary Tree
Follow ups: Why use BFS? why not DFS? How can the same be done with DFS? No code only discussion.
Answered all questions.
Coding II
Question 1: 560. Subarray Sum Equals K Variant
Return true or false
Asked if I can reduce space/time complexity
Question 2: Antidiagonal of a matrix
No hiccups in this round.
I had to do a behavioral redo.
Questions were same as the behavioral round 1. This time the interviewer was much nicer and I had perfected my stories better.
Study resources for system design:
Huge shoutout to Hello Interview. It really helped me understand the basics, how to drive the interview etc. Alex Xu system design books part 1 and 2.
Resources for coding interview:
Leetcode
Again a huge shoutout to @CodingWithMinmer. He is doing some fantastic job for the community!
Heard back from recruiter after onsite in 4 days.
Heard back again from recruiter in 1 day after followup that I had passed HC(Hiring Comittee).
Timeline: Recruiter reached out early December. I had just started studying then because I was looking at internal teams within my company as well.
Finished onsite in March. Total of 4 months including december.It was long journey!