I’ve been an interviewer at Meta for 6 years and since we started rehiring I started interviewing again and I would like to share some tips for the coding interview maybe it will help people out there to land a job here faster. 1. If you are doing an intro about yourself, you don’t need to let the interviewer know that you were laid off. Talk about your past employer like it was your decision to leave. If you mention layoff, you could be biasing the interview from the first 5 min (even though we are trained to avoid bias, it’s better to protect yourself as well). 2. Don’t waste precious time talking about what you did since you were laid off. I had people talk for minutes about how they traveled the world, etc. It’s irrelevant for the interviewer. 3. Don’t go into depth about your side projects, if it’s not relevant for the interview. 4. Keep the intro limited to 30s or one minute at most. Let the interviewer ask you follow-up questions if they want to know more. 5. Most of the interviewers at Meta have been here for awhile and they’ve been asking the same coding questions for years. These questions are all leaked on Leetcode, so just focus on practicing Leetcode as much as possible to increase your chances of passing the interview. I’ve been asking the same 2 questions for 6 years but I rarely meet someone who knows how to solve them. 6. Focus on improving your coding speed. You have a very limited time to write code for 2 coding questions. Most of the time is often spent on coming up with the solution. Coding shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes for each question. 7. Know your data structures. Sets/hash maps are present almost in all interviews. Linked lists are quite common as well. 8. Don’t forget about Verification. Due to the short amount of time, people often forget to verify if their solution is working. Mention unit tests or how you could change the implementation to make it more testable. Just showing initiative here even if you don’t have time to do anything can go a long way. 9. Know the time complexities. Sorting is very common, so you should know the time complexity of sorting and know what sorting algorithm the sort function in your language uses. 10. Don’t waste time sending a thank you note if you know you did poorly in the interview. It’s a nice gesture but it’s not going to change the outcome. Save that time and focus on preparing for the next interview. The interviewers really want you to pass the interview, so don’t be scared of them. For example, every time I pass someone it makes my day better. Good luck to everyone out there interviewing. 🤞
If people can rarely solve the same 2 questions do you think the questions may be too difficult? Im assuming they have to be LC hards …
They are Leetcode Medium, one is a simple decorate and sort, another one is two while loops one for adding elements in a set and one for finding the first element in the second array that is in the set.
Reasonable. Is Meta hiring E4 again?
Very wholesome thanks op
Thanks for this but I suppose this is SDE specific. Any tips for Data Engineering interviews?
Yeah, this is specific to the Coding Interview. Sorry, I don’t have any insight into Data Engineering interviews, but probably Tip 1-4 applies there as well.
Thanks OP!
Should we do all fb tagged leetcode questions??
At least try to do as many as possible in the Easy and Medium category. We rarely ask for Leetcode hard.
I see 650 around
Don't ask candidates to introduce themselves? You can introduce yourself and if the candidate does it great, otherwise start the interview. Also anything not related to the interview is not to be mentioned in the feedback.
I’m not mentioning anything unrelated to the interview in the feedback, my advice was to avoid mentioning those things to save time and to avoid adding any bias even though we are trained to detect and avoid bias. I’ll double check the guidance tomorrow to see if it’s recommended to avoid asking for an intro. When I took the training and did reverse shadow the intro was part of the guidance.
I shut down any attempt by TC to introduce themselves. It’s awkward but better than wasting time. Small talk can be done in the Q&A part in the end.
Blind should auto promote more posts like this. Thank you OP. Do you have insight into how interviews are different for L6 vs L7?
^ this. The Coding Interview is the same across all levels. Only the System Design and Behavior have different expectations at different levels.
Legitimately the best post I've seen on Blind in weeks
When asking coding questions or system design questions. Does the interviewers have the ability to look into the candidate's profile on what was asked on previous interviews?
Yes. We get this info before the interview and we are recommended to avoid asking the same question.
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What are those 2 questions that you usually ask
The first one is finding the first k smallest elements in an array. For privacy reasons I won’t mention the second, but it’s a very common one.
Thank you kind sir