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
- 25-Minute Screen, Sorting Complexity and Cache Review, RejectedMercor · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026Rejected
Sorting Complexity They asked me to come up with a sorting algorithm that is as inefficient as possible and explain its time complexity. One idea is to enumerate all permutations of n distinct elements and check one by one whether each is sorted. There are n! permutations in total and each check takes O(n), so the worst-case time complexity can reach O(n × n!). Strictly speaking there is no singl…
- 30 Minutes, Misread One Rule, No Time to FixHudson River Trading · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026Rejected
My HRT interview had the same question as this other post (the link I'm referring to is dropped here). Their bar is really high. In half an hour you need to understand the problem, explain the problem, explain your approach, write the code, explain the code, and run it. I went straight to the optimized solution: record the capacity in each of the four directions (up, down, left, right) for every…
- 45 Min Coding Plus 15 Min Free-Form ML Design, Onsite Invite Next DayUber · Machine Learning Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026In progress
The phone screen format was 45 min coding + 15 min design. For coding I got the high-frequency "find robot" problem. I discussed the brute force solution with the interviewer, then how to precompute the distances in all four directions to speed it up, and finally wrote the optimized version. The interviewer didn't provide any test cases in HackerRank and didn't ask me to write any either. I only…
- 45-Minute Phone Screen with Rate Limiter Coding and System DesignAtlassian · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026
45 minutes of coding + SD. It seems like there's no Karat anymore? The interviewer was also a current Atlassian employee. Coding Implement a simple rate limiter, assume all input values are valid. Part 1: check(time_bucket: int) -> bool The time bucket never decreases. Each call to this function counts as one more request in that time bucket. If the number of requests in the time bucket is greate…
- 60-Minute Screen With a Numpy Embedding Ranking QuestionYahoo · Machine Learning Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026
60 minutes, coding + ML knowledge. The coding had to be done with numpy. The input was a user embedding vector and N item embedding vectors. Taking the dot product of the two gives a similarity score. The task was to sort the N items by score from high to low, and the output is the list of item indices after sorting. The follow-up: if the user has already seen some of those items, filter the seen…
- 90-Minute Four-Level OA, Only Passed Two LevelsAirbnb · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Aug 2026Rejected
The OA was 90 minutes with 4 levels, and I used C++. Looking back, I probably should have used Python, which would have saved a lot of time. They also require your camera and mic on the whole time plus screen recording, and you have to show ID before you start. No AI assistance at all; they said you can keep one tab open for looking up syntax. It has really been a long time since I last job hunte…
- A 30-Minute HR Screen Driven by Follow-up QuestionsEY · Technology Consultant · HR Screen · Aug 2026
I had a referral, and three days after the referral I received an HR phone-screen invitation. I scheduled the call for the next day. The HR interviewer was very experienced. They did not ask me to introduce myself and instead moved directly from small talk into questions about my previous experience. They asked follow-up questions based on our conversation, and we spoke for about 30 minutes. The…
- A 45-Minute C/C++ and OS AssessmentNetApp · System Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026In progress
Job description NetApp's flagship storage operating system. C, C++, and Unix/Linux system programming are required. Familiarity with the design and development of system software. A strong understanding of operating-system internals. Personal background I worked in China from 2018 through 2025, then came to Ireland for a master's degree in 2025. I have about six years of work experience, so I am…
- A 60-Minute Payment State-Machine OAStripe · Software Engineer · New Grad · Online Assessment · Aug 2026
Stripe new grad SWE OA. I did it about a week ago, and my memory is a little hazy. It was basically a state machine + OOP. Sharing this to save everyone some time. 60 minutes, progressing through levels. Nothing difficult algorithmically, but there really was a lot of code to write. A payment system, using command-line-style instructions. One detail worth mentioning: every command has the same nu…
- A 60-Minute Split Between ML and CodingSnapchat · Machine Learning Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026
The phone call was divided into three time blocks. During the first 15 minutes, I gave my introduction and answered behavioral questions. The middle 15 minutes covered machine learning fundamentals. We discussed how to address overfitting, how to address class imbalance, the basics of optimizers, and model evaluation metrics together with their definitions. I was also asked to give a brief introd…
- A 90-Minute OA and Only Time for Brute ForceMicrosoft · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Aug 2026
The latest OA: 90 minutes, two questions, with AI hints for the second question. I only managed to write a brute-force solution for the second one. It probably needed DP, but I ran out of time. 2571 You are given an integer array requiredSum of length n. Build an array result of length n that satisfies all of these conditions: result is non-decreasing: result[i] ≤ result[i + 1] for every valid i.…
- A Brand-New Rectangle Coding Question and a Grid System DesignOpenAI · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026
I just finished my OpenAI interview and wanted to share today's experience. Unfortunately, the coding round gave me a brand new question I had never seen before. The topic was Rectangle. Roughly, you maintain a 2D board, and requirements get added step by step: add rectangle remove rectangle undo after that there were follow-ups like removeAt / batch remove The whole thing was multipart, adding o…
- A Course Schedule Variant That Didn't Quite RunCitadel · Software Engineer · Intern · Technical Screen · Aug 2026
This was for a 2027 summer internship, interviewing in the summer before my junior year. The first 15 minutes were self-introduction plus resume questions. The resume question was pretty vague — the interviewer only asked one question, but it actually bundled two things together: my most technically challenging experience, and whether I had a feature that directly helped with product commercializ…
- A Four-Level Banking System Online AssessmentAirbnb · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Aug 2026
I recently took Airbnb's software engineering online assessment. I hope this question format helps people who take it later. One of the online assessment questions was a banking system or filesystem with unit tests. It was similar to CodeSignal's progressive-level problems. It was not a set of independent LeetCode questions; instead, new requirements kept being added to the same codebase. The ove…
- A Four-Level In-Memory Database AssessmentTradedesk · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Aug 2026In progress
It was no longer the recipe problem, but there were still four levels, and the general idea and direction had not changed much. Level 1: Given a key, field, and value, write the value into the database and implement insert, delete, and update operations. This can be done with one nested map or two maps. Level 2: There were two search operations. The first search uses the key and field to list all…
- A Four-Part Online Assessment on Stats, OLS, and C++Headlands · Research Developer · Online Assessment · Aug 2026
I remember that when I applied two years ago, the question was still that C++ engineering problem — manually parsing an input string, handling timestamps, and running Kahn's Algorithm to compute a dependency graph. This time the OA was completely different, split into 4 parts. Since you had to keep your camera on, I couldn't take screenshots or photos, so everything below is from memory. 10 stati…
- A Greedy Deletion Problem on a String of 1s and 2sDRW · Software Engineer · New Grad · HR Screen · Aug 2026
I got a string greedy problem: Given a string digits made up only of '1' and '2', which represents a positive integer. You can delete 0 or more characters from it, and after the deletion: the number of remaining '1's must be even; the number of remaining '2's must also be even; and, while satisfying those first two conditions, the final integer should be as large as possible. Note that you can on…
- A Group Anagrams Twist and a Write-vs-Read Tradeoff QuestionCoupang · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026
Team: Marketplace Growth, the US team (people in the group said the whole org is about 100 people — 50–60 in Korea, 30–40 in China, and only this one team in the US, around 10 people; the org head is based in the US). Process: one phone screen (57 min) → onsite, same team. Phone screen structure: ~35 min coding → ~13 min project Q&A → ~10 min reverse questions. Coding (HackerRank) Question: a var…
- A Half-Hour Recruiter Screen on AI SafetyAnthropic · Software Engineer · Senior+ · HR Screen · Aug 2026In progress
I received an outreach email from a recruiter in August. I originally thought we would just chat briefly and then move forward to schedule the later interviews, but we ended up talking for about half an hour. The recruiter asked quite a few questions, including: "Why Anthropic?" "How does your previous experience relate to AI safety?" "Why do you think you are a fit for this position?" "How large…
- A healthcare technology Business Analyst Interview Experience: microphone troubleshooting and SQLA healthcare technology · Business Analyst · HR Screen · Aug 2026
My interview began with the usual conversation basics, then quickly became a mix of communication, role fit, and practical technical checks. I introduced myself, discussed what I enjoyed outside work, location preferences, whether I could handle shift work, and my willingness to relocate. On the technical side, I was asked fundamentals and small scenario prompts. One question was what I would do…
- A healthcare technology Software Engineer Interview Experience: Java, SQL, and OOP basicsA healthcare technology · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Aug 2026
My process used online assessments followed by a practical technical interview. The assessment covered programming fundamentals and SQL, while the technical screen stayed close to basic OOP and core language skills. I was asked Java and SQL questions, including a query to find the second highest salary in an employee table, along with a Java logic question. There were also versions of the process…
- A healthcare technology Software Engineer Interview Experience: unclear required in-person HR stepA healthcare technology · Software Engineer · HR Screen · Aug 2026
I got far enough to be told that I needed an HR discussion, but the requirement was confusing. It sounded mandatory to do it face to face in a specific location far from my hometown. I asked what the round involved and what kinds of questions they planned to ask because I did not understand its purpose or format. The process lacked basic transparency, which made preparation difficult. Beyond the…
- A Live O(1) Rolling Mean Question and Deep Factor GrillingJump Trading · Data Scientist · Onsite · Aug 2026
Since this is an experienced hire, there are relatively fewer coding questions. There's a lot more talk about your resume and the methodology behind your past factors — and they go into it in real depth, the kind that gives you chills and makes your heart pound. If you don't actually have results to back it up and you're just talking up your own effect, it's basically very hard to get through. Li…
- A Maddeningly Vague Data Sampling QuestionCitadel · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026
Citadel is out of their minds. The first half was fine — a normal self-introduction, project walkthrough, basic behavioral questions. Then the coding part started and that's where the craziness began: The interviewer was mumbling and couldn't speak clearly, and gave me a purely verbal problem: "we have millions of data points that need to be labeled," and told me to find the useful data. I kept f…
- A Metrics Database in the Second Coding RoundVercel · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2026
This was my second coding interview, after passing the earlier coding round with the hiring manager. It was on CodeSignal. The code had to run, but there weren't any prewritten test cases that my code had to pass. That was pretty nice. It seemed that as long as it compiled, writing one or two simple tests with print statements was enough. The problem was to implement metricDB. A metric class had…
- A New Coding Question, a Blank Editor, Never Reached Part 3, and Didn't Pass the Phone ScreenStripe · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026Rejected
It seemed like a new question — I don't think the interviewer had interviewed with this one much before 😅, he wasn't very familiar with it either. Communication took quite a while, and sometimes the shadow and the interviewer disagreed with each other 😅 Part 1 gave a main() and a function header — you just had to implement the function. The interviewer initially said the output was an integer, bu…
- A New Rule-Chain Validation Question in the ScreenPlaid · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026
Unfortunately I ran into a question that wasn't posted here before. This was a few weeks ago, and the interviewer was a woman. Question: Chain Validation The system has a set of validation rules. Each rule has two fields: [rule name, result] The result can be one of three things: "pass" — the rule passes "fail" — the rule fails the name of another rule — meaning the final result of the current ru…
- A News Aggregator Design Followed by a Fast RejectionRippling · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026Rejected
The system design phone screen used the news aggregator problem from the question bank, and all of the questions were standard. I had prepared this problem carefully, so I thought my answer went well. I also answered every follow-up, and the interviewer seemed satisfied with my responses. Even so, I received a rejection about ten minutes after the interview ended. The result and its timing left m…
- A Perfect Cloud-Storage OA Score Followed by RejectionAirbnb · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Aug 2026Rejected
I received the OA immediately after applying, got a perfect score, then received a rejection email a week later. The problem was a cloud storage system. It had four levels. You only got the next level after finishing and submitting the current one. Level 1: Support adding new files, retrieving files, and copying files. Level 2: Support finding files by matching prefixes and suffixes. Level 3: Sup…
- A Point Cloud Config Design Question, Not LeetCodeGatik · Machine Learning Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026In progress
A recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn first. I talked to the company's HR, and they told me the company currently has fewer than 500 people, builds mid-range self-driving trucks, and just closed a Series D round, so they're hiring more. Then I talked to the CTO. I mostly talked about what I'm currently working on, and my earlier PhD research direction matched what they do pretty well. Then th…
