Meta E4 on-site interview experience (passed)

Had my Meta on-site interviews a couple of days ago. Here’s how it went: Behavioural: it went well. Interviewer asked questions on past experiences and expected answers in STAR format (he clarified this in the beginning). Asked about 3 or 4 questions and lots of follow ups on each. My previous prep for Amazon helped, didn’t need to prep anything extra. System Design: I feel like I messed up a bit in the beginning. Interviewer gave a list of goals and non-goals. I did not understand him well due to his accent and started designing for the non goals too. He seemed a little annoyed that. But I quickly apologized and changed course. It went relatively smoothly after that. But I wouldn’t say I’m great at system design. So I’d say it went just okay. Also missed a component that the interviewer pointed out. Coding 1: 2 LC tagged medium questions. Solved first one quickly and optimally. For the second one I proposed an O(n) space solution but the interviewer wanted O(1). I had to think for a bit but eventually arrived at the solution and completed it. Had some redundancy in the code because I tried to code really quickly. But we didn’t have time to fix it and the interviewer said it’s fine. Coding 2: first one was an LC tagged medium. Solved this quickly and optimally. Second question I’d never seen on LC. Got pretty nervous initially, and it took me a long time to come up with an optimized solution. I thought this would mean a fail for sure. I came up with the answer with about 5 minutes to spare, and luckily the code was short so I quickly coded and tested it. He asked a follow up which I only answered verbally, didn’t have to code it. Here’s what I did to prepare: - behaviour: prepped for Amazon leadership principles before this, so I was able to reuse all those answers - system design: read Alex xu vol I and the grokking course on educative. Practiced some extra system design problems I saw on LC discussion pages. Also paid for two mock interviews through exponent. -coding: solved about 300 LC, mostly meta tagged, 20 hard and about 200 medium. Also studied all DSA from scratch. Overall I prepped for about 7 months. But that’s because I was pretty weak on DSA fundamentals initially. Anyone that had their on-site or are preparing for it, good luck! You got this!! Disclaimer: I won’t share interview questions because of the NDA, please don’t ask! TC: 140 k Yoe: 4