Meta Production Engineer Phone Screen
Summary
I recently interviewed for a Production Engineer role at Meta, encountering both a coding challenge involving file processing and a system troubleshooting scenario. Despite my efforts, I was ultimately rejected.
Full Experience
I recently had a phone screen for the Production Engineer role at Meta. The interview consisted of two main rounds. The coding round involved two questions. One was a difficult 'Battleship board variant' that I don't recall the exact details of, but it was beyond what I had practiced, requiring strong DFS/BFS skills. The second coding question asked me to write a program to read multiple files and identify common words, along with the files they appeared in. The troubleshooting round presented an open-ended scenario: given standard system metrics (I/O, disk, CPU), what additional information would I gather for a frequently crashing site? I felt I performed around 8/10 in coding and 10/10 in troubleshooting. However, the recruiter informed me that my performance wasn't satisfactory in either, which felt disheartening, as if they had already decided not to move forward.
Interview Questions (2)
Multiple files were given, and I had to write a program to read those files and print the common word(s) along with the file(s) they belong to.
If all the standard metrics (I/O, disk, CPU, etc.) are already provided, what additional information would you gather from the system for a site that frequently goes down?
Preparation Tips
My preparation involved thorough practice of DFS and BFS algorithms. However, I found that relying solely on LeetCode's 'Meta' tagged questions was insufficient, as the problems I faced, particularly the file-handling ones, were quite unique and unpredictable. My advice for others would be to expand beyond common tagged questions and focus on a deeper understanding of fundamentals and diverse problem types.