My friend finished their meta full interviews recently, wanted to share his experience. He was interviewing for E5 with 6 YOE

Phone screen:

q1: valid palindome ii - correct TC + optimal solution

• followup valid palindrome iii (mostly verbal, didn't actually get the correct solution for this and gave the wrong TC)

q2: clone graph - correct TC + optimal solution but needed some hints during implementation and interviewer even wrote a line himself to help. Didn't finish implementation

Onsite

system design
design whatsapp - was not great. Managed to get HLD but didn't really have time to deep dive much, just some fault tolerance and database sharding. In hindsight they should have talked about tradeoffs more (polling vs websockets) as interviewer didn't seem convinced about ws choice.

coding 1
q1: making a large island - correct TC and optimal solution, but needed a hint. Purposely skipped this during prep thinking they won't ask a hard :(

q2: subarray sum equals k - variant. correct TC. originally gave the optimal solution for original problem, but for the variant you can optimize space better, got the correct solution after a hint.

coding 2
q1: exclusive time of functions - correct TC and optimal solution

q2: all subsets of a string - optimal solution, gave the wrong TC but after a hint got the correct one.

behavioral
standard questions

Thoughts

started prepping around march. solved ~50 meta tagged questions. his overall LC is ~150 but it's closer to 75 if he only counts this year (last time he leetcoded was 2022). codingwithminmer videos are really helpful, they cover variants. 4 of the questions (5 if u include the followup) were new to him

For system design he paid for hellointerview premium, didn't do any mocks but he wishes he did one or two.

Behavioral hellointerview also has a really great section and ai assistant to put together some stories.

Coding was not as hard as he expected, he thought he failed the PS but after getting good feedback realized the communication is really important. Just talking through the code as you implement helps alot so the interviewer can follow but also helps identify bugs. he also thought hints aren't necessarily negative, as long as you pick up on it. But if they hint at a bug and you still don't catch it, then it may be a red flag.

He doesn't think he did well enough for an e5 offer, and with e4 headcount being closed he doesn't expect a downlevel either.

Another notable thing is that meta interviewers were all SUPER nice and helpful. Honestly the nicest interviewers out of companies they interviewed for so far.