Meta E5 Software Engineer Coding Interview Sliding Window Substring

👋Hi everyone, just sharing since this community helped me a lot Meta has always been my dream company. I felt so stressed and couldn't sleep the night before. During the interview, I was running on 4

👋Hi everyone, just sharing since this community helped me a lot Meta has always been my dream company. I felt so stressed and couldn't sleep the night before. During the interview, I was running on 4 hours of sleep but caffeinated enough to be functional. The interviewer started with a super short intro and then jumped straight into a string manipulation problem.

Details The question was typical Meta style, not too hard once you realize the approach, but tricky details and worth practicing if you can. I was asked a variation of a substring search problem, where I had to find the shortest substring that fit the input constraints. I walked through the O(n²) brute force ("check every substring") but mentioned we could do better. Pivoted to a sliding window approach and used a hash map to track frequencies which was O(n). talked through some edge cases like what I would do if the inputs were empty or there were no valid results. I saw this problem online already here so that definitely made things easier: https://offerretriever.com/questions/24 I felt like the interview went pretty well, waiting for the result now.