Interviewing Q&A and Videos

I’m about to start interviewing and will be borderline between senior and staff eng. What does the interviewer look for to distinguish between the two? Is it mainly in the behavioral portion?

Preparation: Standard top 100 LC problems + Infra System Design Problems + Behavioral problems (STAR)

Interviews

Meta phone screen: Asked two questions directly from the top 50 LC tagged (Array Sum and Tree BFS categories). Aced both questions and was notified the next day that I had moved on to onsite. Onsite prep: This would be my first system design interview and I didn't want to mess it up. I booked multiple mocks and though they weren't cheap, I was satisfied with the overall quality, feedback, and accurate grading. Meta onsite 1 (coding): This round tripped me up and I was disappointed given how much I had prepared 🙁 First question: (got optimal runtime, but not optimal space) Second question: Multiple binary searches on an array (did not get the optimal solution, couldn't find a question to tag) Immediately after the round, I realized my mistakes on both questions but couldn't go back and change it 🙁 Meta onsite 2 (behavioral): No surprise questions and I answered them to the best of my capacity stressing my ability to work with other people specifically Meta onsite 3 (system design): The question is similar to I had trouble understanding the interviewer and threw all my system design knowledge out there. There wasn't much discussion but I did mention concepts such as inverted index, sharding, replication, hot partitions, cache invalidations Meta onsite 4 (coding) This was my strongest performance and I was proud of myself after this round. I solved both questions optimally

• Question 1: (LC Hard)
• Question 2: Surprisingly (given my other rounds) I received a call the next day saying that they wanted to give me a follow-up coding round Meta onsite 5 (follow-up coding) I fumbled this round, which was especially heartbreaking. The questions were related to Palindrome (LC Hard) and Grid DFS Same day I was notified that I was rejected 🙁 Eye-opening experience overall and I know I have much more work to pass next time around. Total time: ~1.5 months

I have a Codesignal Assessment to do for Dropbox. The way I plan on prepping is to go through as many of Dropbox's questions on Leetcode as possible (there are only 25 for all time) and to look over Glassdoor. This is the standard approach and I think it works well here. My small concern is that since this is a Codesignal Assessment, it's going to be more real-life-like and less Leetcode-y. I don't believe there's any way I can tweak my study, so I still think the standard approach is the optimal approach. Can people confirm and offer their thoughts? Thanks!

I received a verbal offer from Meta for the Android role and I'm in a team matching phase. Recently team matching has been a lot of struggle and could take weeks or maybe months. Last year a lot of hiring managers posted on LinkedIn about hiring for roles and I did exchange a conversation with them. Is it wise to ask the hiring manager on LinkedIn about open roles in their org and then telling my recruiter about it or I should go with a team that the recruiter helps me to connect with?

I think I could get an L5 offer now if I pushed for it, but is it fine to level myself at L4 to make things easier on myself? Then I'll try to perform at L5 anyway but it will be a-ok to not quite make it.

Meta recruiters request references of people you have worked with before who are current employees of Meta before submitting feedback file to review committee. My question is what & how much impact does providing these references have on your application, candidacy and the ultimate outcome of the interview process. Does it hurt your chances to not be able to provide these one or more of these references?