Meta Interview Experience | E4/L4 | Canada (remote) | Apr 2024[Offer]

• Status: 12 YOE
• Position: Senior Software Engineer at a BANK
• Location: Toronto, Canada
• Date: April, 2022

I consider myself an average (probably below average) coder. This is because I still have to use my hands to calculate simple things like 7 + 19. Additionally, I often find myself googling basic coding tasks, such as how to initialize an array of integers with values, how to throw a new exception with a string message, and how to open and read a file. Medium-level coding questions sometimes take me an entire day just to understand the question or solution.

During my early coding journey, I experienced many mental breakdowns, especially in the first two months, and often felt like giving up. Thankfully, my wife was very supportive, and having someone there for me made a significant difference. I hope you also have someone to support you through your LeetCode journey.

I have tackled around 200 questions on LeetCode, but I couldn't solve a single one independently at first. Perhaps I managed to solve less than five questions on my own, but my solutions were lengthy, messy, and filled with nested if-else statements. In the end, I frequently encountered the Time Limit Exceeded (TLE) error. As a result, I gave up trying to solve the problems by myself and started looking at the solutions immediately.

I bet that the interview questions will be among the top 50-100 questions of each company I interviewed with. This means I need to truly understand and master these top 50 questions, including various solutions (brute force included) for each question. I also search and prepare for follow-up questions.

I believe that humans are creatures of habit, so I kept redoing and repeating these questions at least five times for each solution. Eventually, the solutions started to stick in my brain. I spent around five months preparing for and completing two rounds of interviews with Facebook. To achieve this, I had to change my lifestyle and make many sacrifices, similar to many in the Coding community.

Despite having a full-time job with 50-60 hour workweeks and numerous WebEx/Zoom meetings throughout the day, I found time to prepare for coding interviews. By the time I was free to do LeetCode, it was already 10:30 pm, and my brain was exhausted. Therefore, I changed my habits: no more winding down by watching TV at night. Instead, I went to sleep early, woke up every morning at 5 am (or 5:30 am if I hit the snooze button multiple times), and worked on LeetCode until 9 am during weekdays. I sacrificed weekends and holiday time with my child to focus on coding.

If I can do it, you can too. Although I must admit that luck plays a significant role in the interview process.

The Entry

A recruiter found me on LinkedIn and we scheduled an informal chat. Basically just an informal chat to get to know me and what I am looking for.

Technical phone screen (45 mins)

one of the "parentheses" related problems in Facebook tag questions

one of the "palindrome" related problems in Facebook tag questions (follow up question: one of the HARD palindrome question - doesn't need to code for follow up, only explains my approach )

my approach in 1st round:

1. told interviewer I have seen this question before. (every one of them said it's OK as long as you have not seen this in FB interview)
2. explain my idea
3. pseudocode
4. explain edge cases and complexity
5. ask if it's OK to code? if yes, then start coding.

Online onsite :

coding #1 :

• subarray sum equals k (2 scenarios: input are all positive numbers and input could have negative numbers)
• one of the "Lowest Common Ancestor" problems

coding #2:

• one of the "Lowest Common Ancestor" problems (I got lucky here)
• merge k sorted array
• (the leetcode uses list, the question I got uses array)

System design

• similar to design ticketmaster (but less complicated)
• How I prepare for this part:
• I purchased "gr**king system design interview" , definitely worth it!
• (this article/course helped me to put a structure to my answer into this open ended question )

Behaviour questions:

• search the Facebook interview questions in google/youtube, you will get lots of sample questions.
• I mostly look at the sample answers from "CARRERVIDZ" channel in youtube.
• The sample answers are amazing! Not in a million year I would be able to come up with such amazing answers.

Aftermath

I felt I did really bad on the SystemDesign round and one of the coding round.

I was expecting a REJECT, but I received a call 8 days later and they are proceeding with an offer for E4/L4. I guess I got lucky! and super happy that hardwork finally paid off :-)

Wish everyone best of luck interviewing!

Apology if my interview approach offend your ethics.

Like I said, I consider myself an average (or below average), so this is the only way I can pass the interview.

And if I can do it, so can you. :-)

FYI, of course I got rejects too. I got reject from Amazon and Coinbase.