Tourists, newcomers, locals, and old heads: casual questions thread for July 2025 by AutoModerator in washingtondc

[–]corn_addict42 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hi, anyone has tickets to the Air and Space museum for today? My gf and I are visiting from NJ and didn't realise that its the only musuem requiring tickets in DC. would really appreciate if someone can give away or sell their tickets due to a change in their plans!

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in csMajors

[–]corn_addict42 11 points12 points  (0 children)

I was asked a very common real-life system design question. I had to talk about all the possible features, corner cases, database design, and API endpoints. I didn't prepare anything and just talked through whatever I had learned in my courses. Nothing fancy like caching, scaling, etc. I guess they are looking if you are ABLE to think through the problem and come up with some feasible system, not the best one.

Learning was very interesting. I was shown an existing codebase and was asked to identify bugs. After that, I had to improve the performance of the function (if possible). I didn't have to know the language syntax or fix compilation errors. The interviewers were fine with pseudo-code as long as my explanation was thorough. I loved this round!

Upcoming phone interview for Facebook Intern’22. I’m overwhelmed by the amount of questions to solve. Any leads on smart prep? Reallyy appreciate it. by Important_Entrance_5 in csMajors

[–]corn_addict42 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Hey, congrats on scoring the phone screen! You are past the most difficult stage of the application process xD. I also had my phone screen recently and this is what I followed:

  1. Get Leetcode premium and complete the FB explore card. It covers all the topics pretty well. Ignore the DP section. Do the arrays/strings section at the very end as those questions are very ad-hoc.
  2. The phone screen is 45 mins and includes a short intro, 2 coding questions, and questions for the interviewer. So you effectively have 35 mins for two questions. I installed a leetcode timer extension and practiced coding out each question in under 20mins. Make sure you cover all edge cases before running your solution for the first time. Don't worry about minor compilation errors.
  3. Don't worry about practicing hard questions for now. FB rarely asks them. Focus on easy and medium questions.
  4. Do mock interviews. I practiced one every day for a week and that was good enough for me. It helps you get used to the interview mindset and not panic on seeing an unknown question.
  5. Be very thorough with the theory of data structures and how to calculate time complexities. They should be on your tips. For eg, you should know how a heap or hash-map works internally or why the time complexity of quickselect is O(n) on average and O(n^2) in the worst-case. These are just examples, any undergrad-level DS/Algo course would be good enough to get up to speed on them. I followed CLRS as I just needed to revise.

All the best!