How can I best prepare for Big Tech interviews in limited time?

When do you finish your part-time masters at Georgia Tech? Doing the masters, working full-time, and doing interview prep is too much. For the next round of interviews, I'd strongly recommend that you compartmentalize, perhaps taking a semester off from the program.

I think the best bet is to (1) solve all the questions tagged with Meta on Leetcode, and (2) do some mock interviews. It's hard to create shortcuts for interview prep, unfortunately.

I also don't recommend applying for just one company: instead, apply for many so you can do 5+ interviews in a short period. You'll find that you naturally get significantly better between the first and last interview.

This Meta seems opportunistic, so it's great to pursue it, but I'd calibrate your expectations (sounds like you're doing this)

• +1 to the idea of considering taking off a semester per Rahul. The beauty of OMSCS is that you can take up to a year off and return. yes, you can finish OMSCS while at Meta (though some would advise against it) -- it is possible.
• GA will help you somewhat for coding rounds, but there's it's not the same as running a lot of DSA prep. and you don't need DP prep for Meta (not sure about LI).
• Push to January if you're short on time. There's an argument that there might even be more roles available at that time.
• "This is honestly to get an experience of what the interviews are like. People pay for mock interviews and it just seems stupid of me to let go of such a chance." --> while this is correct, I get the impression that you're not considering the massive, literal life changing money you could be earning by nailing your prep and cracking this interview. Look at Alex's recent video on DSA and the value of your prep time -- now weigh that against the cost of doing mocks. Mocks will have a massive ROI.
• not sure if you're going for E3, but if E4, please don't forget system design prep. Also, don't fall into the trap of whiffing on behavioral interview prep.
  
  Context:
  • graduated from OMSCS, OMSA, and worked at Meta
  • I did all semesters but 1 while in OMSA during my time at Meta
  • also took GA during OMSCS

I'm thinking of picking questions from the frequently asked Meta/LinkedIn problems list on leetcode and preparing for the Interviews solely based on this.

This is a solid approach. I would start with breadth to make sure you are covering all of your bases. In the past, I've used Grokking The Coding Interview because it categorizes different technical questions into patterns. It can be easier to solve coding questions if you can compartmentalize the type of question into one of the patterns.

I would recommend grinding hard during your 6 weeks, having goals in mind for how many questions you want to solve. Also, I would keep a journal to reflect on your solutions to see what you missed or what kind of question gives you trouble the most.

It helps building intuition with DP, Graphs and Divide N Conquer problems. On paper I can solve those questions but may fumble with the implementation.

I would make sure that you run your code. With pseudocode, it's possible that you could have a misunderstanding of programming language syntax, and you don't want to discover that during the interview.

I would also make sure to time yourself when you are going through a question.

I'm not sure if Meta makes you code on the computer, but I would try to mimic your interviewing environment as much as possible. If you are coding on a computer for the technical interview, make sure you code on a online IDE. If you are coding on a whiteboard for the technical interview, make sure you can use dry erase markers to write out your solution on a whiteboard.