I’ve been preparing on and off for more than a year, but never used to get calls from good companies. Finally, I got a call from Meta for a software engineer role. This is the only FAANG company that ever reached out to me after filling hundreds of applications. I was super excited and thought maybe this is my break.

I asked for 3 weeks time before the technical screen and solved ~150 Meta-tagged problems.

Interview day:

Q1: Missing Elements in Sorted Array
– solved it, but fumbled a bit while explaining.

Q2: All Nodes Distance K in Binary Tree
– I was so happy when I saw this, because I know it really well. Almost made a mistake, but caught it during dry run and fixed it. Left the interview thinking I did well and will clear this round.

After a few hours in office, I suddenly realized I completely forgot to use a visited set in BFS for the second problem… which basically made the whole solution wrong. Next day, rejection mail. A small part of me hoped I’d still pass, but yeah… didn’t happen.

Now I feel kinda stuck. 3 weeks of prep just for this, and it went down the drain. I’m not strong in LLD/HLD either and already failed some interviews earlier because of that. I was hoping this would be my breakthrough, but instead it just feels like another big miss in a streak of failures.

Not sure what to do next, just trying to clear my head.