Meta Phone Screen [rejected]
- Posted
- 8 Apr 2025
Summary
I had my first ever phone screen with Meta, where I was rejected after solving one coding question and struggling with a follow-up. I did not receive any specific feedback for improvement.
How it went
Q1: 1570 https://leetcode.com/problems/dot-product-of-two-sparse-vectors as is Solved by condensing vectors into [idx, val], then two pointers
Q2: Follow Up - what if vectors are not sparse and instead have blocks of repeated numbers like [5, 5, 5, 5, 2, 2] Stumbled and could not figure it out, eventually with hints made it to a similar structure of [val, frequency] but never wrote any code. In hindsight the solution seems easy but nerves, pressure, time really factor in.
Was my first ever phone screen so at the end I asked the interviewer for feedback around how I could improve for future screens, was told they are not allowed to disclose that. Recruiter said the same thing afterwards. Kind of sucks that they don't provide any direction around where to focus your future prep effots.
Questions asked (2)
- 01
- 02
Dot Product of Vectors with Blocks of Repeated Numbers
Data Structures & Algorithms
Follow Up - what if vectors are not sparse and instead have blocks of repeated numbers like [5, 5, 5, 5, 2, 2]