u/letsbefrds wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Thanks for your info I'm also preparing for my phone screen in two weeks. I never really learned DP and was able to do some simple problems like house robber using memo + recursion but most of the tutorials for better solutions uses DP. Because of this Ive just been deep diving
u/michaelnovati replied ·
I mean trying to prepare as more of an art than a science. You never know if you're going to get that one interviewer who is rogue and thinks that everyone needs to know DP. Meta has a multi-tiered calibration process so like if you got a week no on a interview that was like super hard and inappropriately hard. then the directors and vice presidents and managers reviewing will make a call that that question was too hard and it might still give you an offer if that was your only week no.
At the end of the day Facebook is not trying to measure for academic understanding of algorithms for they are trying to find people who are 1. really good problem solvers and thinkers about problems, 2. can write clean code, that's elegant. and demonstrates that you have a clear understanding in your mind of what's happening.
The biggest things people failed on in my interviews were number two. People will sometimes solve a problem almost perfectly except that it has like an unnecessary if statement and with hints and direction they just can't figure out why that unnecessary if statement is there and how to fix it or identify that that's less clean than a better solution and that might bring down a strong hire to a week hire. And then they go on Blind And Reddit saying how they studied 2000 problems and had perfect solutions and didn't get an offer and their life is devastated spreading up perception that you need to do thousands of problems to even stand a chance and just not true.