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
- A 70-Minute OA With 14 Excel and SQL QuestionsCapital One · Data Scientist · Online Assessment · Oct 2025In progress
Timeline: applied mid-April, got the OA invite in early May. Duration: 70 minutes. Content: 14 questions total, with a big SQL question in the middle. The content matched what people have shared here in past years almost exactly — really grateful to everyone who shared before me, it was super useful for prepping! Questions 1-7: you download a csv file. The one I got was about an online ad platfor…
- A 70-Minute, 15-Question OA With Excel, SQL, and StatsCapital One · Data Analyst · Senior+ · Online Assessment · Oct 2025In progress
Capital One Senior DA Submitted my application on the 9th and got the OA the next morning on the 10th. Then my procrastination kicked in at full strength and I put it off all the way until today, emmmmm. Overall the difficulty wasn't too high, just like people here have said. It's split into three parts, 15 questions, 70 minutes. You get your score right when you finish, and it logs how long you…
- A Brutal CRR SQL Question with LAG and 4-5 CTEsGoogle · Data Scientist · Technical Screen · Oct 2025Rejected
This isn't a super fresh write-up, but while I was prepping I noticed there weren't many Data Scientist interview experience posts here, so I'm sharing mine. First was the HR phone screen — we talked a bit about projects I'd worked on before and they asked about my SQL and Python experience. I passed and got scheduled for the first round. The first round had two sessions: they said it would be on…
- A Case on Ditching Traditional Branches for DigitalOneMain Financial · Data Scientist · New Grad · Technical Screen · Oct 2025
Had my interview today, so let me do a recap while it's still fresh. I got a VP who spent 15 years at Capital One before jumping to this company. He came in like a machine gun from the start — honestly it's a waste he's not a rapper. He jumped straight into a case: OneMain's credit card business has two flows — a traditional branch business and a digital business. Q1 was why OneMain would want to…
- A Case Round That Was All Numbers, No StrategyCapital One · Business Analyst · Senior+ · Other · Oct 2025In progress
Capital One Senior Business Analyst When I was prepping for this interview and came looking for interview reports, all I could find were ones for data analyst roles, so I told myself that once I finished mine, I'd write one up to help other people interviewing for business analyst positions. Let me introduce my background first (though probably nobody's interested) — I have a Business Analytics m…
- A Cloud Pricing Case with Break-Even MathCapital One · Data Scientist · Technical Screen · Oct 2025
A minicase about a cloud service — not sure if it's a new one, I don't remember seeing it on the forum before. The setup was a startup doing cloud services. We supposedly had our own advantage (I didn't quite catch what the advantage actually was, but personally I don't think it affected the rest of the questions much). Q1: How would you structure the product offering? How would you generate prof…
- A Four-Part OA With Two Weird Simulation GamesRoblox · Data Scientist · Intern · Online Assessment · Oct 2025
Roblox's DS summer intern OA has 4 parts: the first two parts are games played on Roblox's own platform, the third part is basically behavioral multiple choice, and the fourth part is coding. Part 1: the car-building game, 25 minutes total; 2 sections, 13 minutes each, and each section has two different terrains. You need to equip a car with different parts to get it through both terrains, and th…
- A Full-Day Power Day Onsite Ending in an OfferCapital One · Quantitative Analyst · Onsite · Oct 2025Offer
I've read a lot of interview reports on the forums and gotten a lot out of them, so let me quickly share mine. The position I interviewed for was Quantitative Analyst. HR just asked about my visa status and then scheduled an HM phone interview. The HM interview was on Zoom. At first I thought there'd be some technical or resume questions, but it ended up being basically all BQ. A lot of it was ab…
- A GHC Resume Pickup Ends in a Failed First Virtual OnsiteBloomberg · Software Engineer · New Grad · Onsite · Oct 2025Rejected
Application timeline: 9/26/2025: Found a referral and applied for the 2026 Software Engineer - New York role. The position isn't open to the public — you can only apply through a referral. 11/2025: Went to GHC'25, talked to a Bloomberg engineer, dropped off a paper resume, and saw them mark it up. 11/13/2025: Unexpectedly got the schedule-VO (virtual onsite) email — must have been picked up throu…
- A Grocery Loyalty Case With a Database-Outage TwistCapital One · Data Scientist · Technical Screen · Oct 2025
I finished my interview in the afternoon and got notified the next day that I'd passed. But my next round wasn't a PD round — it was another case interview instead. I don't know if any of the intern applicants here can confirm whether this is the standard process for everyone. For the mini case, the interviewer introduced themselves and then we got started. It was the grocery loyalty membership c…
- A Long Process Built Around CEO Philosophy and a No-Calculator Math OAShopify · Data Scientist · HR Screen · Oct 2025
Mainly want to complain about how bad the experience was with Shopify's interview process. TL;DR: it dragged on forever and had way too many rounds. Recruiter call -- they reached out to me first and spent the call selling their own company, selling the CEO's philosophy. I don't know if they genuinely believe in these lofty ideals or what, but it came across as unfriendly and really nitpicky. The…
- A Monetization Case Built Around a Messenger P2P Payments FeatureMeta · Data Scientist · Intern · Onsite · Oct 2025
This was for the Data Science, Analytics (PhD) summer intern position. The interviewer's background was in monetization. His questions followed pretty much the standard pattern you see on the forum — business goal / metric / experiment — and then he dug into specific points based on what I said. Roughly, he asked: Do you think it would be worth adding a Venmo-like peer-to-peer money transfer feat…
- A Pair Programming Round That Turned Hostile Once Recording StoppedShopify · Software Engineer · Onsite · Oct 2025Rejected
This one really was a unique interview experience. First, the referral doesn't go to a specific role — the referrer just submits the candidate's resume into their system, and recruiters periodically screen resumes and reach out. Two days after my referrer submitted me, the recruiter emailed to set up an informational chat — just a quick self-introduction and a walkthrough of the hiring process —…
- a Quick HR Call Just to Schedule the MinicaseApple · Data Scientist · HR Screen · Oct 2025
Simply put, it was very simple — basically no difficulty at all. We scheduled about an hour, but they actually only asked me three questions: What's your current status? What's your highest degree? When can you schedule the minicase? As long as you answer honestly there's no problem. In the middle, I also asked two questions. My highest degree is a master's, but I couldn't find my undergrad schoo…
- A Redis Curveball on the Etcd RoundDiscord · Backend Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Oct 2025
Sharing a Discord interview experience — I interviewed for a senior backend position. I really like Discord, I use it pretty much every day for gaming, so I do have a soft spot for this company. Overall impression The interviewers had mostly been at the company for 6-10+ years, very professional, technically strong, and the interview experience was great — it basically felt like solving a problem…
- A Robot Room Cleaner API VariantMeta · Machine Learning Engineer · Onsite · Oct 2025
Meta recruiters often say they won't ask hard questions, but there are still interviewers who ask hard problems or hard variants. Robot Room Cleaner API variant. Recording the core approach and the easy-to-miss details here for anyone who needs it. Problem summary The map is unknown, boundaries are unknown You can only interact with the environment through the robot API: move() turnLeft() / turnR…
- A Seven-Round Loop with a Take-Home and Three Manager InterviewsDoorDash · Data Scientist · Onsite · Oct 2025
The interview process went like this: Round 1: HackerRank assessment — SQL plus some data analysis questions. Round 2: HR screen — talked about why I was interested in DD, my project experience, and why I was looking to switch jobs. Round 3: Hiring manager interview — mainly talked about project experience, plus a DoorDash case Q&A. Round 4: Take-home — given a DoorDash dataset to build a predict…
- A Simulation-Style Infectious Disease QuestionOpenAI · Machine Learning Engineer · Onsite · Oct 2025Rejected
I interviewed onsite for a completely new question I had never seen before -- five parts in total, and I only managed to finish three, so I definitely failed this round. The prompt was described as "simulation style." Beforehand, people on the forum said it would probably be GPU-related, so that is what I prepared for, but it turned out to be about infectious disease instead. Posting this so othe…
- A Smooth Power Day of Case, BQ, Case, and DCCapital One · Data Scientist · Onsite · Oct 2025In progress
I interviewed for C1's power day this week. Coming back to give back to the forum with my interview experience. I was nervous going in because I hadn't finished prepping in time, but the whole process turned out to be pretty smooth and not that hard. My power day order was case-bq-case-dc. Round 1, case: a coding-style one, I'd already come across this one before so no real questions there. Round…
- A SQL Screen Where Every Question Got Follow-Up After Follow-UpTwitch · Data Scientist · Technical Screen · Oct 2025
Just finished my SQL interview, written on CodePad. It was pretty similar to a question set from the forum, but the interviewer kept hammering me with variant follow-ups on every single question... my brain was practically on fire. Every row in this table represents one minute, recording what a streamer was doing during that minute: Q1: total monthly hours streamed for each month, in order by mon…
- A String-Templating Coding Round, Then a RejectionCrowdstrike · Software Engineer, Cloud · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Oct 2025Rejected
Sharing a fresh rejection story. I don't have a cybersecurity background. I applied for a senior SWE, cloud role. The position requires being based in the US Eastern time zone, since it involves working with the team in Europe. First was an HR screen, with some basic questions — whether I knew Go, what the most complex project I'd worked on was, that kind of thing. At the time I thought I had no…
- A Take-home Dataset Task, Then an Unresponsive SQL ScreenFetch Rewards · Data Scientist · Technical Screen · Oct 2025Rejected
This company doesn't have an HR call. Right from the start they send you a dataset and have you do an analysis on it — pretty simple, takes an hour or two at most. After passing that, the first round is a phone screen. 45 minutes, just SQL and a product case. There were two interviewers. I actually thought the question itself was pretty simple — it was about a beverage company that had noticed it…
- A Two-Part Invoice Matching Coding ScreenGoogle · Data Scientist · Technical Screen · Oct 2025
We started with quick self-introductions on both sides — no deep-dive project questions. Then came two coding questions built around a single scenario; the questions and the amount of code involved weren't trivial. At the end I got to ask the interviewer some questions. Q1: Given the invoice ID inside a payment's memo, find the matching invoice in the invoice list and output the result. My approa…
- A Web Crawler Question Derailed by a Concurrency StumbleAnthropic · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Oct 2025Rejected
Classic interview question: web crawler. You can also find this one on the usual practice-problem site. First single-threaded, then the follow-up was multi-threaded. Only need to consider pages under a single hostname. The extra piece compared to the practice-site version is that you need to handle the fragment — the #... part of the URL needs to be stripped. No need to worry about URL normalizat…
- Airtable Customer Success Engineer interview: scripted questions and unclear system promptsAirtable · Customer Success Engineer · Other · Oct 2025Rejected
The process started well. The recruiter seemed organized, and I was excited about the opportunity. Once I reached the interviews, though, it became difficult to take the process seriously. In one session, I was put on hold immediately. The recruiter then read questions from a script without much back and forth, and I didn't feel the interviewer was genuinely engaged with my background. The hiring…
- An Ambiguous WordGuess Coding ScreenVerkada · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Oct 2025Rejected
Here's another question that wasn't from the interview-experience wiki: Need to throw an exception when the input isn't valid. The interviewer's description of the problem was really ambiguous. I spent forever trying to clarify it and still couldn't figure out what he actually wanted. Was I supposed to implement just this one function, or simulate the whole game? The interviewer kept being vague…
- An Hour-Long Life Story Screen and No Salary Range from HRShopify · Data Scientist · HR Screen · Oct 2025
Shopify feels like a total outlier among interviews, honestly 😂 The life story portion alone took a full hour.... You definitely have to read the company brochure HR sends over ahead of time — they'll ask what you thought of it. You don't need to go super deep, but you do need to praise it a bit. I'd suggest dropping it into ChatGPT and having it summarized for you.... either way, you have to rea…
- An Onsite Derailed by a Disrespectful PMRoblox · Data Scientist · Onsite · Oct 2025
Roblox is a really hot pre-IPO unicorn, and lately they're hiring a lot, so a lot of candidates are interviewing there. I get it, a lot of people want in, but I have to complain a bit — the experience was, if anything, worse than others I've seen on this board. After the IPO the stock will probably pop, but long-term it's genuinely hard to say. Phone screen 1: HM The hiring manager was pretty nic…
- AR, AE, SQL, and BQ Onsite Rounds, No OfferMeta · Data Scientist · Onsite · Oct 2025Rejected
Honestly, way too many people have been copying interview notes over to Xiaohongshu lately, so I've set some limits on mine — I don't want to be scrolling xhs and suddenly run into my own interview notes, lol. AR: Felt like a new question — hadn't seen it in recent interview notes. The question was: suppose you're on the ads team and you built a new ad recommendation model, how would you go about…
- AR, AE, SQL, and BQ RoundsMeta · Data Scientist · Onsite · Oct 2025Offer
I interviewed for a Meta DSA onsite a while back and got the offer, so I want to write this down while I still remember it. My takeaway from the interview is that the real thing differs from interview reports in the details, so when you prepare you still need to keep your thinking flexible. Grasp the big picture, but don't just memorize answers. The interviewer wants a fairly quick response — bas…
