Meta Software Engineer interview experience

It still included the architecture and behavioral pieces, but I was also put into a live coding and debugging-style session.

That live format changed the whole feel of the interviews for me. Instead of solving a clean, perfectly presented LeetCode problem on a blank slate, I had to navigate messy code under time pressure and actually debug what was happening in the moment. The goal wasn’t only to reach an optimal answer; it was to see whether I could work through uncertainty and complexity in real time.

The process ended without an offer, and the main reflection I carried afterward was that