real interview stories, told over a cup of tea ♡
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.
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3935 results
- Trexquant Investment Quantitative Analyst interview with hangman take-homeTrexquant Investment · Quantitative Analyst · Take-home Project · Feb 2026
I started with a coding-focused hangman take-home assignment. It came with performance expectations: clearing a minimum level would earn an invitation to the superday. The assignment included a hangman strategy described as a baseline, along with typical win rates and the expectation that I beat it. After I finished, I had a round focused on my solution and my Python implementation choices, inclu…
- Trexquant Investment Quantitative Analyst interview: LeetCode, statistics, and Stamford final roundTrexquant Investment · Quantitative Analyst · HR Screen · Feb 2026
The process began with a recruiter screen covering my background and previous work. Then I had a technical interview that combined a resume review, a medium LeetCode problem, and statistics questions. Later, I reached an in-person final round at the Stamford site. Those interviews focused on models and techniques connected to the work on my resume. The pace was fast from the beginning, and a lot…
- Twitch Software Engineer interview: OOP assessment and no offerTwitch · Software Engineer · HR Screen · Feb 2026
I interviewed for a Software Engineer role at Twitch. The process felt fairly standard: a recruiter screen followed by an assessment focused on object-oriented programming. The recruiter screen covered my resume and previous work. The technical assessment involved an OOP coding question. I wasn't offered the role. My main takeaway was to be ready to code directly around object-oriented fundamenta…
- Two Back-to-Back Rounds, BQ Plus OOD and a Course Schedule TwistAmazon · Software Engineer · Intern · Onsite · Feb 2026
The Amazon intern interview was pretty classic. The two rounds were back to back, one hour each. The BQ part asked pretty classic stuff — mainly 3 common conflict scenarios, one dive deep, and one out-of-responsibility question, plus a relatively new question about using generative AI. There were quite a lot of follow-ups overall, but basically none of them were especially technical — my feeling…
- Two Coding Phone Screens and a Quick RejectionSnowflake · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Feb 2026Rejected
Both rounds of my coding phone screens were with interviewers from the company's tagged LeetCode question set. I'd recommend grinding more LeetCode before you go in. The first round was LC 210 style — directed graph topological sort. Not much to say about the problem itself, except I had to write my own test cases. The interviewer for this round didn't seem to be feeling well — she was coughing a…
- Two Friendly Video Onsites, Offer Three Weeks LaterMathWorks · Software Engineer · Intern · Onsite · Feb 2026Offer
9/7 – Received the OA. I don't really remember the details anymore. 9/2 – Got notified it was the last day to do the OA, so I did it quickly. Three fairly simple questions, plus a recorded video interview (details shared earlier in this thread). 10/21 – HR reached out to schedule an interview. 11/7 – VO1. One question was the second question from the OA, plus a greedy problem. Aside from asking a…
- Two Onsites, Rejected Over "Communication Clarity"Asana · Software Engineer · Onsite · Feb 2026Rejected
Round 1: Given two code snippets and asked what they do, plus their time/space complexity Jigsaw Puzzle design — the forum said pseudocode was fine, but the interviewer still made me pick a language and write actual code Round 2 (split across two days): Ascii Printer: 1 hour of coding (the last 45 minutes the interviewer asks questions about your code). A handful of functions to implement. A 10x6…
- Two Rounds Merged Into One 70-Minute Call, Rejected on the CaseHome Depot · Business Analyst · Onsite · Feb 2026Rejected
In late October 2025 I got an interview for the Home Depot SBA role through a friend's referral, and I'm here to share my rejection report. Since I hadn't interviewed in a long time, and my friend's strong referral really helped, the process moved really fast — 10 days total to get through 2 rounds of interviews (actually 3 rounds, since the hiring manager decided to merge round 2 and round 3). T…
- Two Rounds on Video Retrieval and CLIP, Then SilenceSnapchat · Machine Learning Engineer · Technical Screen · Feb 2026No response
I just finished two rounds of interviews this week, applying machine learning to design a short-video recommendation system. The first round covered how to design a query retrieval system, assuming only 20% of the short videos have text descriptions. They specifically asked how CLIP works, what loss functions are used in contrastive learning, what the drawbacks of embedding-based methods are, whe…
- Voleon Data Scientist interview with Python modeling and analysisVoleon · Data Scientist · Technical Screen · Feb 2026Rejected
I went through a thorough, structured interview process with Voleon. It started with an initial interview, followed by two technical interviews, two soft-skill interviews, and a final tech-focused interview. There were a lot of rounds, and I got the sense that they were trying to cover several different areas instead of testing only one skill. The technical interviews involved Python coding tasks…
- Weak BQ, a Dispatcher Coding Round, and a Fast RejectionAirtable · Software Engineer · Onsite · Feb 2026Rejected
Onsite. The rest of the loop covered questions that have already been discussed elsewhere, so I won't go over them again in detail. The behavioral question round was the usual boilerplate. I hadn't prepared for it, and I also didn't click with the hiring manager, so I answered pretty badly — I'm guessing this is where I get rejected. One of their signature questions: they push an inclusive cultur…
- Web Crawler BFS Screen, Twitter Design Onsite, RejectedNooks · Software Engineer · Onsite · Feb 2026Rejected
This is a small company in SF that does phone-sales tech (cold-calling/telemarketing technology). Phone screen: a BFS problem dressed up as a Web Crawler question. Follow-up: the BFS needs to make API calls — how do you avoid bottlenecks, DDOS attacks, and so on. Onsite: Live debugging: build a full-stack app for a "YouTube Party." This one was kind of fun — the problem is posted publicly on Gite…
- Whatnot Software Engineer interview with an unstructured behavioral processWhatnot · Software Engineer · Feb 2026Rejected
My process started with mostly behavioral conversation, and it felt a little unstructured. A hiring manager asked quick, experience-based questions, but I never got a clear sense of what they were prioritizing or how much detail they expected. Whenever I started to expand on an answer, I’d get interrupted or the conversation would move to the next question. The logistics were messy too. I coordin…
- Zipline Software Engineer: take-home, system design, and a month-long ghostingZipline · Software Engineer · HR Screen · Feb 2026No response
The process took longer than I expected, although it started out feeling genuinely fulfilling. I went through six stages overall: a recruiter call, a hiring manager screen, a take-home assessment, a technical interview connected to the assessment, a system design interview, and a product prioritization conversation. The later rounds also included a culture-fit discussion and an interview with a V…
- A BQ Round That's All About Your ProjectsMeta · Software Engineer · Other · Jan 2026
This round was Meta's BQ (behavioral questions) round. Overall it felt more focused than Google's on digging into your personal ability through your own projects, and the questions flowed into each other pretty naturally. 1) Ambiguity The opening question was: "How do you deal with ambiguity?" I answered using a fairly complex project where the information was incomplete, and went into a lot of d…
- A CDF Coding Question, Constant Interruptions, and a Second Round That Never HappenedUber · Data Scientist · Technical Screen · Jan 2026Rejected
The coding question was: given a PDF, compute the CDF. Then the case question was about designing an ETA system — what you need to consider. This was my first interview, and I found this interviewer's style was completely different from the paid mock interviews I'd done before. When I did mock interviews before, several people advised me not to think out loud while talking — better to take a minu…
- A Debt-Settlement Variant of LC 465Pinterest · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Jan 2026
Position: SR. Software Engineer A one-hour phone screen, and the question was a variant of LC 465 — it felt like it needed the accounting concept of settling balances, and if you hadn't seen something like this before you probably couldn't have gotten it. The problem was roughly this: a group of friends goes on a trip, and you're given a list of transactions. Each one has a payer, an amount, and…
- A Friendly BQ Round That Kept Digging Into Conflict and OwnershipGoogle · Software Engineer · HR Screen · Jan 2026
The interviewer for this BQ round was very nice and friendly, and took notes the whole time. Overall it didn't feel like an interrogation, more like a logical conversation — they kept circling back around the same competency and probing deeper. Disagree / Conflict First asked: have you ever disagreed with someone. After I gave an example, they followed up asking how I generally deal with conflict…
- A Groupon Break-Even Case, Fast-Tracked to the Next RoundCapital One · Data Analyst · Technical Screen · Jan 2026In progress
I just interviewed for the C1 SBA minicase yesterday, and it was the exact same Groupon case that's been floating around! If you're running a restaurant, you're considering whether to partner with a platform like Groupon. 1) What factors would you consider? 2) Given data: number of tables served per day: 20; avg spend/day: $30; cost: $0.40 per dollar spent; FC: $100/day — what is the daily profit…
- A Hangman Variant and a Recursive Async Job TwistDropbox · Software Engineer · Onsite · Jan 2026
The OA was a design question — you needed to implement a class that supports some basic operations, similar to a banking system. Next is the onsite, split into two stages total. This post mainly covers the first stage. Behavioral: This round mainly revolved around one of my bigger projects, and we went pretty deep into it. The interviewer was more like digging into specific points to discuss furt…
- A Late, Awkward Interviewer and One Linear-Fit QuestionCitadel · Data Scientist · Technical Screen · Jan 2026
The technical interview was supposed to be 30 minutes, but the interviewer showed up 5 minutes late. Fine, whatever. Then he introduced himself, and the whole thing was really awkward — he stumbled over his words the entire time, and all he actually said was his name and his job title. Then he just froze there, like maybe he was supposed to say something about the company, but he said nothing at…
- A Linux-Heavy Super Day With No FeedbackConfluent · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Jan 2026
Role: Confluent - Senior Software Engineer - Cloud Traffic Screen: look up a word in a given file — each line of the document is one sentence. First find a word in the document, then as a follow-up find a phrase/sentence in it. Just talked through the approach at a high level; optimizing with a hashmap was enough. The feedback said I needed hints. VO (super day) — Specialty: intense grilling on L…
- A Poker OOD Question I Didn't Practice ForRippling · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Jan 2026
Just finished a fresh Rippling phone screen, so let me write it up while it's still fresh. The question was an OOD problem based on a poker game — I pasted the full prompt below. Going into this interview I mainly grinded Delivery Cost System and Expense Rules System OOD. I did see this Poker question when I was collecting interview reports beforehand, but I only skimmed through the approach once…
- A Sparse Sliding Window Over Infinite BagsAmazon · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Jan 2026
The first online-assessment question was set in Amazon's financial team. An analyst had an infinite line of bags numbered from 1 onward. Information about the money in the bags was given as continuous, nonintersecting segments. Every bag inside a segment held the segment's stated amount, while every bag outside the supplied segments held zero. The goal was to choose exactly k consecutive bags tha…
- A Streaming Renewal Case I Didn't PassCapital One · Data Scientist · Technical Screen · Jan 2026Rejected
I interviewed for a mini case at Capital One (C1) a while back and didn't pass. Today I want to share the questions and do a bit of a retro. The interviewer was a guy who used to work in consulting (I get the feeling C1 has a real preference for consulting backgrounds). He started with a quick self-intro, then had me introduce myself. He mentioned the official time allotted for this case is one h…
- A Text Editor, Then a Mock Spark RDD Where I Blanked on IntersectDatologyAI · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Jan 2026
Writing down the questions from my DatologyAI interviews back in January at the start of the year. At the time I couldn't find anything about them online 😂 so I'm filling in the gap. Jan 6: The first round was with an interviewer who works on frontend. The question was to implement a text editor: Implement a TextEditor supporting: type_in(char): type a character at the cursor backspace(): delete…
- A Topological Sort the Interviewer Drew on the SpotAmazon · Software Engineer · Intern · Onsite · Jan 2026
Round 1's interview and timeline are covered in a separate link, so I won't repeat that here. The interviewer described the question verbally: Amazon has a ton of services, and there are dependencies between them. When we take some of those services offline, figure out which other services end up affected. Clarifying questions: always, always do this first — get the conditions of the problem comp…
- A Weird Product Sense Round, Then SilenceWhatnot · Machine Learning Engineer · Onsite · Jan 2026Rejected
The recruiter reached out before the new year, but it got pushed to after the new year before interviews actually started. Whatnot is a livestream sales platform. The recruiter screen was simple, just chatting about my background and interests. They quickly scheduled the HM interview. The HM interview was half an hour, also mostly chatting about background and interests, but they did ask what imp…
- Asana Software Engineer interview with roughly six roundsAsana · Software Engineer · Jan 2026Rejected
My interview process felt well organized overall and took place over about two weeks, with roughly six rounds. The interviewers were friendly and collaborative, and the questions generally matched what I had seen mentioned elsewhere, including coding and design topics related to the role. I received a rejection with a list of areas to improve. That was discouraging because when there are several…
- Asana Software Engineer interview: two-hour OOP coding sessionAsana · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Jan 2026Offer
My process started with a coding round, followed by a system design round, and then security became part of the evaluation too. After that, I had a longer, two-hour coding session focused on OOP. That coding block was less about solving one algorithm and more about writing classes and methods, then explaining my logic and time complexity. I had to talk through my thinking as I worked, not just pr…
