Prior to a coding interview, you are given access to a preparation hub. It contains videos from the author of "Cracking the Coding Interview," which are poorly produced. They can be meandering and are not edited well. They play in low resolution with no option for higher quality, making it difficult to read the code. The video player is also buggy, often skipping back while you're watching. There is little quality control; perhaps they should hire someone to fix it, though they likely have little incentive to.

Had a one-hour interview consisting of 30 minutes of standard soft questions and 25 minutes for a coding exercise. This is the standard "coding challenge" format. If you have memorized data structures, complexity, Big O notation, or even the specific problem found on LeetCode under "Meta," you will likely pass. I implemented a working solution but later realized my statement of the time complexity was slightly off, which likely meant I didn't pass (just my guess). Suggesting the right data structure that could have led to a faster solution might also have helped.

Ultimately, the coding challenge portion of these interviews primarily tests if you have studied data structures and/or LeetCode problems and can recall them well enough to present during an interview. It has little to do with actually building software.

One of the Leetcode coding problems, tagged with Meta, was further down the list in frequency.