Hi all,

I just completed my Meta phone screen today – the scariest 45 minutes of my life. Leading up to it – I had about ~2-3 wks of prep time. I took the advice of people on teamblind, whom simply just suggested to do FB tagged problems on Leetcode. They weren’t completely wrong – as the problems I received were similar – but not exactly the same.

1st question – probably an LC easy or medium? More towards easy IMO. Traverse through a binary search tree and return the average of nodes that fall in between a range of integers: low + high. Simple enough; I was able to solve this one and explain my thought process. Simply traverse through the tree and check if the value is in my range, if so – add it to my running sum, and increment my counter. I missed a few edge cases, but was able to resolve them with some tips from the interviewer. Not a problem on the FB tagged top 50 or 100, but no biggie, fairly simple problem.

2nd question – LC hard; I didn’t remember doing this problem on LC, but I remembered doing something similar. The prompt was.. given a string of integers, let’s say… 12345, return all possible combos with + and – that give a certain target, let’s say 100. So.. something like 1 + 23 + 4 – 5 was possible to return the possible solution. I explained that I’d take a DFS approach to this problem, but wasn’t able to explain the potential time complexity, nor was I was clearly able to mention how I’d go about doing the DFS. If I had more time, I could’ve gone through and coded this up fully, I think.

45 minutes is a short time period for 2 problems from LC.. I think I flunked it – but… at the very least – I’M FREE! These past 2-3 weeks were the busiest and most stressful weeks of my life, but I can at least say I tried my hardest to succeed, even if I failed.

Anyway, on to more LC so I don’t have to struggle like this again for other opportunities 🙂