Notes on Meituan's Fall Recruiting

Morning, everyone!

Intro: ✍️ Fall recruiting season is in full swing and the tech market is warming up a bit. Yet another tired worker bee quietly fired off a resume to see what level I'm at right now, and then....

Background

I'm currently a senior, an ordinary undergrad, majoring in software engineering. Why this major? Honestly, pure love for it. Unlike the elite-school crowd or the genuinely gifted, my path here has been pretty bumpy.

You can probably imagine the academic vibe at a less prestigious university. That's a consequence I brought on myself, but you make do once you're there. The big lesson: nail down your goals and career plan before college starts.

The wheels of fate start turning

In the second semester of freshman year, I joined the school's algorithm lab for various reasons. It was basically a self-study room — we'd team up for programming contests. That's when the wheels of fate started turning, and where I met my partner, haha (doge). OK, back on topic.

Doing contests in the lab really pushed my skills and how I think. The one bummer was that because of the pandemic, we never traveled off-campus to compete. But contests are a great forcing function — the process feels a lot like finals week, pulling all-nighters to not flunk out.

The turning point

Time flew. By second semester sophomore year we split into front-end / back-end tracks. As a frontend fanboy I picked frontend without thinking, but I didn't drop backend either — just made it secondary. School material is shallow, so most of my real learning came from "Bilibili University". Around then I started using github, that's so cool. The world's largest "homosexual dating community" lives up to its reputation, haha. You see tons of incredible open source projects, and you can open issues and PRs on the ones you care about, contributing back. For a stretch I was in there every day looking for cool stuff.

LeetCode

Algorithms are a programmer's inner game. LeetCode problems are classics. Treat them like a level-up game and you'll get more out of it. You don't need to grind a ton — one a day is enough. Try multiple solutions per problem and actually understand it. For frontend specifically, the data structures you'll touch most are trees and arrays, so I'd practice those harder. Find your rhythm and just do it.

Fall recruiting

Last Saturday I sat the Meituan written test. Difficulty was upper-mid — solid prep would carry you. Someone like me who walked in cold was obviously toast. Big tech really cares about fundamentals.

• computer networks
• design patterns
• basic algorithms
• binary trees -> heaps
• compilers
• databases

...

Plus a lot of pattern-finding and reasoning problems. The two coding questions leaned toward reasoning rather than pure algos and data structures. It's accumulated work — you have to put in the reps over time.

The principle is like building a house: weak foundation, things collapse the higher you go. Take frontend: a framework is just a tool, what matters is how you think about solving problems. Vue ships route guards, React doesn't — so what do you do?

Got a feel for how big tech recruits, and that's a useful experience in itself. Now that I know, time to keep shoring up the fundamentals and try again next year, haha.

Thanks

I had a lot of help along the way and it pushed me a lot. Thanks to my friends Xiaotong, Lengchui, Houzi, Shuzi, Taozi, and to my oo.

Closing

This post wasn't about tech — just a quick look back at my path. May we all land an offer we're happy with this season.