Meta Software Engineer Interview Experience — Rejected After an Onsite Where the Interviewer Argued Over Big-O Notation

I just got told yesterday that I didn't pass, so I'm reporting back to the forum — and venting a little while I'm at it.

Phone: a coding round.

OA: a banking-system themed problem. I only passed two rounds, but was told I'd still move on to the onsite.

Virtual onsite:

• System design: the same question as another post I'd already seen on the forum.
• AI coding: a card game — design a strategy to guarantee your own win rate. Recently they've added AI into the mix, Gemini and ChatGPT — I think the one I picked was Gemini, and it went ahead and helped write the code, and it even passed all the test cases.
• Coding, problem 1: find the length of the shortest subarray where max − min ≥ k. I said I'd use two pointers. Then the interviewer kept saying he couldn't understand the code I'd written, and even asked me what a line with "++i" meant. He gave me a test case at first, I ran it, and he still didn't get it, so he gave me another test case and made me write out the result of every single step next to each line of code. Speechless.
• Coding, problem 2: kth largest. This one was even more ridiculous. I started by saying I'd use a priority queue, time complexity n log k. He insisted on correcting me and said it was k log n. I said, well, you still have to go through the array at least once, so that's already O(n) right there — I was basically rolling my eyes at this point. Then he asked what I'd improve, and I said quickselect, best case O(n), if the pivot you pick each time happens to land roughly in the middle. Then he made me prove, using statistics, why the pivot would land roughly in the middle each time. I was speechless again. And in the end he didn't even let me write the code.

The next day the recruiter told me I didn't pass, and I wasn't surprised at all. This was my second time interviewing at Meta, and the overall experience was terrible.

Last year the recruiter pushed me to interview for E5, and I even got sent to committee. This year I said I only wanted to interview for E4, since I know it's hard to survive as an E5 at Meta — and this is how it went anyway. The first coding interviewer didn't even show up, so we had to reschedule, and I ended up running into this jerk. I really am just not meant to be with Meta.

But this time it clearly felt a lot more toxic than last year. Last year, in the closing small talk, a lot of the interviewers would complain about Meta's PSC themselves, saying they really didn't like it. This year, every interviewer I talked to went on about how great Meta's "layoff spirit" was, how completely right it was, the best company culture in the world. Yeah, right. We really are just not simpatico, culture-wise.