Meta Phone Screen
- Posted
- 15 Jun 2025
Summary
I successfully cleared my phone screen interview at Meta, answering two specific LeetCode problems and their follow-ups, and have been selected for on-site.
How it went
Q1: https://leetcode.com/problems/merge-sorted-array/description/
Follow-up: Can you merge starting from the beginning of each array instead of from the end? Yes/no - explain with examples.
Also, the size of the arrays were not given.
Q2: https://leetcode.com/problems/group-shifted-strings/description/?envType=company&envId=facebook&favoriteSlug=facebook-thirty-days
No time for follow-ups
Verdict: Selected for on-site.
Questions asked (2)
- 01
Merge Sorted Array
Data Structures & Algorithms
Open the problemMerge Sorted Array. Follow-up: Can you merge starting from the beginning of each array instead of from the end? Yes/no - explain with examples. Also, the size of the arrays were not given.
- 02
Group Shifted Strings
Data Structures & Algorithms
Open the problemGroup Shifted Strings. No time for follow-ups.
How they prepared
- Eat and breath the top 150 Meta tagged questions.
- Make sure to handle all the edge cases - even the trivial ones. E.g., what will happen if the size of the array is 0, 1 etc.
- Always trace your code with the examples given. Then try to come up with some your own test cases if possible.
- Explain your code line-by-line while writing and explain why you are doing it. For example, if I use a defaultdict instead of normal dicttionary, just explain why you are doing that and how it will help. You can do this while writing the code itself.
- Time management is the key. And to manage time, you should practice the questions really well. I had submitted the above two problems at least 5 times in the last week.