Giving back to the community.

I recently had a Meta Production Engineer interview and wanted to share my experience.

Coding round:
I was asked two questions:

Battleship board variant – I don’t remember the exact question, but it was definitely a hard problem. You might find similar variants online, but the one I received was a level above anything I had practiced. My advice: practice DFS and BFS thoroughly.

Common word across files – Multiple files were given, and I had to write a program to read those files and print the common word(s) along with the file(s) they belong to.

Troubleshooting round:
It was an open-ended question. If all the standard metrics (I/O, disk, CPU, etc.) are already provided, what additional information would you gather from the system for a site that frequently goes down?

Result: Rejected.

P.S. Do not rely solely on LeetCode “Meta” tagged questions. I prepared well, but I ended up getting questions I had never seen before. The worst part of the PE interview is the unpredictable file-handling questions—there’s no telling what they might ask.
I personally felt I performed around 8/10 in the coding round and 10/10 in the troubleshooting round, but the recruiter told me I didn’t perform well in either. Honestly, it felt like the interviews were conducted with an attitude that they didn’t want to move forward.