Meta Phone Screen SWE E4 | Cleared

Sharing my recent Meta SWE E4 phone screen experience - cleared it and got invited for onsite!

Here are the questions that were asked:

Q1) - https://leetcode.com/problems/buildings-with-an-ocean-view/ No variant, standard version.

Interviewer mentioned that right-to-left traversal was allowed, so I gave that approach.

Had a small syntax issue in my for loop, which the interviewer pointed out, fixed it and dry ran with test cases.

Interviewer asked if the code could be made cleaner, it was already time and space optimized, and I couldn’t think of much more on the spot. (Maybe could have mentioned the monotonic stack approach, but we moved on.)

Q2) https://leetcode.com/problems/diagonal-traverse/description/ No variant, standard version.

I started with the simulation approach, briefly mentioned the diagonal index relationship but didn’t explore it too much.

Honestly, was a little confused on the simulation, interviewer then changed the question to a simpler "diagonal in one direction" version.

Interviewer gave a small nudge about the row/col relationship, which I elaborated on.

Coded the simpler version using a hashmap and dry ran it, also verbally explained how it would work for reverse diagonals.

Interviewer asked about how to optimize further, I was still thinking about the original simulation idea, but at the last second I mentioned using an array instead of a hashmap.

Good luck to everyone preparing!