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Meta·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen·Intermediate

Intermediate
May 2026

Summary

Meta phone screen for a software engineer role, just one coding question the whole time. Pretty straightforward string manipulation problem but the edge cases kept me second-guessing myself.

Questions Asked (1)

Q1

Given a sentence as a string of space-separated words, convert it to 'Goat Latin' by applying a set of transformation rules: words starting with a vowel get 'ma' appended, words starting with a consonant have their first letter moved to the end before appending 'ma', and then each word gets a number of 'a' characters equal to its 1-based position in the sentence.

Algorithms & Data Structures
Author's notes

I got the basic logic pretty fast but the indexing tripped me up.

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AI HintsAI Generated

Suggested Approach

Start by clarifying the rules and edge cases, then outline a step-by-step algorithm that processes each word based on its first character and position. Write clean code with helper functions for vowel checking and building the result, and test with examples to ensure correctness.

Pro tip: Mention that you would handle edge cases like empty strings, multiple spaces, and punctuation, and discuss time/space complexity upfront to show thoroughness.

1. Clarify rules and edge cases

Confirm the exact transformation rules and ask about edge cases such as empty input, multiple spaces, or non-letter characters.

2. Design the algorithm

Split the sentence into words, iterate with index, and for each word apply the vowel/consonant rule and append 'ma' plus 'a' repeated by position.

3. Implement with helper functions

Write a function to check if a character is a vowel, and build the result string efficiently, avoiding unnecessary string concatenation in loops.

4. Test and validate

Run through provided examples and additional edge cases to verify correctness, and analyze time and space complexity.

Key Points to Mention

  • Vowel set definition (a, e, i, o, u, both cases)
  • Handling of consonant-starting words by moving first letter to end
  • Appending 'ma' and then 'a' repeated by 1-based word index
  • Efficient string manipulation (e.g., using a list and join)
  • Edge cases: empty string, multiple spaces, punctuation
  • Time and space complexity analysis (O(n) time, O(n) space)

AI-generated suggestions, not part of the candidate's original notes. May be inaccurate — verify before relying on them.