Meta E4 Phone Screen - Reject

Interviewer was 2-3 mins late

1 mins of greetings and straight to coder pad

Q1 : https://leetcode.com/problems/longest-substring-without-repeating-characters [ No variant]

Solved it within 10-12 mins , gave RT etc , dry run it for a TC, I think I did good here.


Q2: https://leetcode.com/problems/accounts-merge [ Variation ]
Instead of merging accounts you will be given. username : [ emails , .... ]
People with same emails is one person, return a list of usernames
like : [ [ username1, username2 ] , [...] ] where username1 and 2 are same person.


I knew I had to use connected components since I had solved the original problem, but labelling back to the usernames and grouping them was tricky since unfortunately I had not solved the variant before. I figured it out but by the time I could code up the solution time was up , could barely write any code.

Got a reject the next day, Was very disappointed since I had prepared really well , I had done all of the 100-150 meta tagged questions, but I feel time is too less to solve a new problem/ a tricky variant within 15 mins in the interview setting. I guess hard luck will try again. But interviewer was completely robotic no reaction , let me struggle till the end in silence. I tried over-communicating my thought process but that did not help , even though I did come up with the algorithm and if had 5-7 mins more might have coded it up too , all I can do is think about it now, I guess it was not meant to be :/