Hey everyone, I’ve just secured a Meta IC4 role and wanted to share my experience and preparation process.
For context, I have 9 YOE, mostly working at no-name companies doing full stack roles. I’m currently 2.5 years into my current role (startup) and haven’t interviewed anywhere during that time. I also never did leetcode style interviews in the past.
From receiving the initial call to final loop decision, it was a total of 8 weeks.
Screening
First 2 weeks, did all the prep work material on the meta careers website.
Tip: instead of watching the videos on the website look for the equivalent ones in hackerrank’s youtube channel, they’re also done by Gayle and have pretty much the same content, but much higher quality.
After 2 weeks I had my mock interview.
Did ok, solved first problem and brute forced 2nd.
At the end interviewer mentioned I was close to passing but my code was not clean enough.
After this bought Leetcode premium and did 2 full weeks of just Meta top asked questions.
Did maybe 2-5 per day depending on how tired I was, as I didn’t want to risk burning out.
Come screening day, I got two variations of questions that I had seen before (mediums), solved them ok and proceeded to next round.
Tips:
- -Make sure you write clean code, no unnecessary if’s, no unnecessary variables, well named functions/variables, good identation to make it easier to read.
- Always run a manual test case, this is your oportunity to catch bugs and fix them yourself before the interviewer intervenes.
- Think out loud, this one is super important to keep your interviewer in the loop of what you’re thinking. Sometimes your brain may be thinking one thing and you write another, this way they at least know what you were trying to do. (I do this often, saying “A > B”, but write “A < B” or something like that). You can even just say read what you’re typing out loud, that’s fine and helps convey your thought process. I found it also helps me calm down my nerves, as the silence makes it worse.
Final loop
I had 4 weeks to prepare for the final loop.
Product design
To prepare for the Product Design interview I used:
Tried a few others too, but ultimately these gave me the most bang for buck.
I watched one just to get a hang of the process and then for all subsequent ones, I first tried to resolve it myself on Excalidraw and then watched the video and updated my design where it made sense.
I spent the majority of the first 2 weeks on this.
Behavioural
For preparing for behavioural it was a mix of watching random youtube videos and using the AI tool from hello interview.
I didn’t apply the STAR method, and instead tried to set up my examples as stories and tried to make it interesting for the interviewer to listen to.
I didn’t spend much time on this, maybe 2 days.
In hindsight, this was not enough.
Coding
In the final 2 weeks, I could feel myself getting a bit rusty in regards to coding and started panicking.
I then spent the majority of the final two weeks doing more LC top last 6 months Meta tagged questions.
In hindsight this was too much.
Final interviews
I booked both coding for the same day.
The first interview went very well, connected well with interviewer and solved both problems optimally with time to spare.
I don’t remember seeing either of them, but I reckon LC medium.
The 2nd interview wasn’t as good, solved the first exercise optimally but only brute forced the second one.
On the 2nd day I had behavioural + product design.
Behavioural went ok, interviewer was mostly reading questions from a script which felt a bit off as the interview didn’t have much flow.
Product design also wasn’t perfect. I did connect better with the interviewer and we bounced ideas off each other, but overall I felt that time went by VERY quickly.
Tip: Make sure you practice resolving these on a timer. Aim to be able to complete an end to end design in 30ish minutes, including deep dives.
Feedback
Had a call with the recruiter 3 days later.
Overall they were happy with my performance, and I ended up in between IC4 and IC5 as I ranked IC4 for behavioural and IC5 for product design.
I was suprised at getting the IC5 signal, as I thought I needed a perfect design to do so, but that is not the case.
In the end I was placed at IC4, which is a down level from my current role but then again my current role is not at FAANG and I’ve never worked at FAANG either.
Conclusion
I found the process to be really good and well organised. The interviews are difficult, but they really want you to be able to present your best self and give you a lot of time and materials to prepare.
Overall it was good that I managed to pass the interviews with a full time job and two toddlers, so there wasn’t much time for preparing.
I did have to forfeit hobbies or other distractions during this time though.
But if I could do it, so can you!