real interview stories, told over a cup of tea ♡
ZipHQ Interview Experiences
3935 interview stories from candidates at 857 companies: how each round went, what was asked and how it ended. Every company page links to practice questions in the same style.
- 3935
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4 results
- A Graph Pursuit Problem in the First RoundZipHQ · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
The author reports being rejected after a first-round Zip interview focused on a pursuit game in a finite undirected graph. Two players know each other’s locations and can move to an adjacent room or stay still, with the evading player acting first. The question concerned how long capture could take. After the applicant struggled, the interviewer suggested comparing travel distances from the two…
- AI-Assisted Onsite Coding on an Expense Reimbursement CodebaseZipHQ · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026
It was roughly three small problems. They gave us a codebase, but it had so many files that there was no way to read through all of it, so basically you have the AI read and write everything. It was a simple system for managing company expense reimbursements, with features like monthly expense and budget reports. The first problem was that the monthly report data was wrong, for example someone fi…
- Backend Practical on a Questionnaire Evaluator, RejectedZipHQ · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
After HR reached out to me, we scheduled the backend practical interview. Questions: adding features on top of a questionnaire parsing system and condition evaluator Part 1: enable numeric question input and condition evaluator (in addition to text input) enable functionality create new test cases Part 2: enable multiple condition evaluation Enable AND/OR on different conditions of different ques…
- Aced the HM Round, Failed a Simple Tree DP ProblemZipHQ · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2025Rejected
Overall the difficulty was pretty easy — too bad I failed this tech round. Tech round: a tree problem. Each node has a value. For each node, you can pick either the current node's value, or the values of its children. If you pick the current node, you can't also pick its children — return the maximum value sum. The core of it is really just getValue(root): return max(getValue(root), getVal(root.c…
