Comment by roadside_picnic
1 day ago
> The point of these problems is to test your cleverness.
Last round I did at Meta it was clearly to test that you grinded their specific set of problems, over and over again, until you could reproduce them without thinking. It's clear because the interviewers are always a bit surprised when you answer with whatever is not the text-book approach on both leetcode and on the interview guide they studied.
Cleverness is definitely not high on the list of things they're looking for.
Interviewers are typically surprised when you do something new because they reuse questions with a lot of people and eventually you end up seeing most variations of a solution.
Cheekily using counting sort ended things the one and only time I agreed to interview with Meta. Definitely improved my inbox for a couple years though.