Meta MLE Interview - never touched LC in my life
Background: Got my BA in '12 (Poli-Sci lol) no job prospects so worked in retail for 7ish years. Went back to school to break into Tech and got my MS in 2020 and landed a job as a React/JS dev. Enrolled in a CS PhD program, moved to the ML team at work - been working in NLP for the last few year-ish I'm post-ms in my program so very little classroom work left. Somehow I've managed to never touch LC or need it. Meta reached out about a MLE position and passed the recruiter screening. However I'm DREADING the LC portion. Imposter syndrome gets the best of me and I picture myself flopping and wasting everyone's time. Never in my life did I think a place like FB/Meta would want me, but here we are. Should I postpone until I can interview for an Applied Scientist position? Or just go for it and the life-changing money/career that could come with it? I've passed/verbal offers from places like Amazon/EY/Consulting but that was mostly JS/behavioral. PhD focus is NLP/social networks. 2.5 YOE, 110k midwest/low-md col #tech #meta #machinelearning #machinelearningengineer #facebook
PhD where if you don't mind Pay for lc premium and grind the fb questions I guess
Yes, this is what I have done 3 times already, it works very well with FB
Just went through the loop and every question was from LC FB tagged sorted by date
You will have coding tech screen and two coding rounds during on-site. Can't avoid the grind.
Thatβs what Iβm learning. Do you know if research/applied areas use an interview like this as well?
All of them use the same coding rounds. For research your ML round would be different.
just do FB tagged top 70-100 LC. like try to understand the patterns. then gradually start timing yourself for each question. this should give you a good enough chance at cracking Meta. LC is always difficult in the beginning, but you'll get hold of it pretty soon. Good luck!
My 2 cents here...im not sure where you're in the leetcode game but I would suppose you need to get comfortable with solving two leetcode mediums in about 40 minutes. Only saving grace is these are asked from a set of 150 odd Facebook tagged questions on leetcode. So you gotta asses where you are and how long would it take for you to get there. It took me a good one year and I am far from comfortable. The bigger question for you is do you even want to play this game. I have heard that phd are usually hired for specialized positions and are usually interviewed accordingly. Would you be interested in those? Point is to be aware of the options and it's consequences and avoid doing a little of everything and ending up in the same place.
Lol I felt that we're on the same boat, I've always wanted to give Meta a shot but never thought that I'm ready. But finally a recruiter reached out. Just take it as a practice, don't stress too much. Try to finish some LC meta tagged questions, then let the fate determine the rest. My mindset right now is if I were to fail, better fail fast and early. Meta is never my dream workplace though, so maybe that's why I'm chilled π
Can't avoid. Take a few weeks to brush up.