Meta E4 SWE USA Infra LOOP | PASSED

Giving back the community 💯🙏

Verdict : Cleared HC, in team matching stage. Background: International candidate (Not new grad), ~2.5 years of work experience. Applied via referral in Jan.

Prep:

1. Did top 200 questions from meta's most recently asked questions list.
2. HelloInterview for System Design (Used the AI practice interview feature)
3. Made sure to note down possible situations from work as they happened that can be used for the behavioral rounds.
4. REVISE THE LC QUESTIONS
5. Make sure the practice questions in the format in which you will deliver them. Talk about testcases, multiple approaches, pros and cons of those approaches, most optimal approach (its okay to learn the quickselect approach for finding the kth largest element 😂), dry run the code, time and space complexity.
6. Scoured the internet for E4 experiences.

Got my recruiter call in february. At the time she mentioned that there were enough E4 positions and that I could take 3-4 weeks to prep for my phone screen rounds and thus I scheduled it in march. Due to some personal reasons, I was unable to give it then and had to reschedule this interview to March end. Halfway through to march end, the recruiter pinged me saying positions are drying up at a faster rate and that it would be advisable to move up the timeline. Anyhoo, I stuck to my timeline because of my prep and my personal life.

Phone Screen: (Did very well)

1. Given a matrix, print the antidiagonals from top to bottom.
2. Given a tree, print the left side view from bottom to top, then root once and then the right side view from top to bottom. (make sure to clear edge cases and talk through these possible cases).

Got my go ahead signal in 2 days, scheduled virtual onsite loop after 3 weeks. I gave this whole week as availability, got lucky with this schedule split. Again got notified that it would be advisable to move up the timeline but I wanted to prep well and was okay with being dropped due to no positions rather than being rejected due to lack of prep. (Luckily I have a job that is not bad and wanted to take my time to prep - definitely priviledged 😊)

Coding round 1 (Did well)

1. Convert BST to Sorted DLL. (Make sure to talk about the edge cases)
2. Variant for Robot room cleaner. I was exactly asked the cheese and mouse variant. Please checkout CodingWithMinmer's video on robot room cleaner.

In this round, I finished the first question as expected, the second one was shaky in that, I gave my approach, explained possible scenarios, gave the space and time complexity but not so perfect part was the dirty code. I had to revisit the code multiple times to make sure I had covered everything. No hints from the interviewer, just a self correction process. Did not get time to completely dry run testcases. At the end interviewer seemed satisfied but I feel the verdict for this round could have swayed both ways because of the fact that there was no clear train of thought while writing the code (Maybe I am nitpicking here but hey gotta be as perfect as humanely possible).

Coding round 2 (Did very well)

1. LCA of Binary Tree.
2. Print the path of the shortest path from (0,0) to (n-1,m-1) in a unweighted graph/grid.

Got through this round smoothly, no major bumps. I code in c++ so the second question took some time to type out.

Behavioral round:

The panel was sweet, luckily the interviewer and I shared the same team in our respective companies, so I assume some relatability would have happened there but no major advantage here. It was nothing more than a mere "nice, me too" kinda situation when the person mentioned their team.

I was asked the standard questions:

1. Tell me about a time you took initiative and delivered impact
2. Tell me about a time you had a difficult relationship with someone and how did you overcome it.
3. Tell me about a time you recieved negative feedback
4. Tell me about a time when your plan derailed due to factors not in your hands and how did you handle it.

This went well subjectively i.e according to me XD

System Design (Did well)

Design an ACM ICPC kinda competition platform with a real time leaderboard

This round was a little different in that

1. The excalidraw tool was super laggy and the interviewer's question kept dissappearing as soon as it was pasted there. So had some difficulty in the start. Additionally, while I was typing and drawing, the tool would randomly freeze or not identify my keyboard/mouse clicks.
2. The interviewer joined 2 minutes late, and took rougly 3-4 minutes to explain the question.

The first 10 minutes went in just understanding the question and adjusting to the tool. The question answering part still went pretty well according to me although at some point I had to rap about some deep dives. There was no time left for questions at the end. The main worrying thing about this round for me was that I was not able to write down around 20-25% of the stuff I said because of the crappy tool. This constitued the deep dives explanations, so yea, got a little worried there. Make sure you are going in the right direction with incremental checkups with the interviewer.

Got a call from the recruiter 3 days later saying my packet is being sent to HC and initial feedback looks positive. Got another call 2 days later saying I have cleared HC and am being put into team matching. Been there since a week now and patiently waiting :)

Huge shoutout to @CodingWithMinmer, I think all your variants are great and really good mental excerices. They really help you approach questions in a different angle, even the ones you are yet to cover. Full power to y'all!!

I hope this was helpful and all the best for your interviews!!

Cheers🥂