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 45-Minute Phone Screen Building a URL ShortenerCoinbase · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2025In progress
Sharing my backend phone screen with Coinbase. The process was a recruiter call, then the phone screen got scheduled about a week later, 45 minutes long. The question was to build the core logic of a URL shortener service, with the following requirements: Support generating short links Support automatically redirecting when a short link is visited Short links need an expiration time Concurrent ac…
- A Brutal Four-Section OA With Coding, Pattern-Finding, and ProbabilityOptiver · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Aug 2025
I think their OA basically gets sent out to everyone — I got mine right after I applied. There are four sections and the intensity is pretty high. The email doesn't mention this, but you can actually do them separately, so I'd suggest doing one section per day. Coding The coding section lets you go back to earlier questions, so if you don't know how to solve one, I'd suggest skipping it first. 90…
- A Four-Level Bank System OA, Time Crunch on Level 3Meta · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Aug 2025
Bank System, an old question. Adding some details: Level 2 needs to output a string with the account info: {accountId}{amount paid out}. For level 3, both all-transfers and pending-transfers are better done with a map rather than a list, to save time. Level 1 is just creating an account, and adding to / withdrawing from the balance. Level 2: count the top N users by total amount transferred out —…
- A Grueling Practical-Coding Onsite, Rejected Over 'Coding Notes'Peregrine · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2025Rejected
I've failed a bunch of these interviews recently — huge amounts of code, all in the details, barely any algorithms. Not sure if I'm just writing too slowly or what, but it feels like they're hiring an AI. The take-home was the same as one already discussed on the forum — pretty simple, just understand the context, aggregate some data, then filter. The hiring manager round had a bit of a weak red…
- a Referral Bump, a Rushed KV Store Round, and a CI/CD System DesignOpenAI · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2025Rejected
This was for an infra engineer role on the data platform team. We chatted briefly, compared backgrounds, and it seemed like a good match. He then asked if I had any connections at OpenAI. I checked LinkedIn and found two former coworkers who worked there, so I gave him their names. I'm guessing he used them as references, because two days later I got an email moving me into the phone screen stage…
- A Restaurant Reservation Coding Question and a Deep-Dive Stats RoundPinterest · Data Scientist · Onsite · Aug 2025
I felt like the whole interview experience was really good — the interviewers listened carefully, and there wasn't that "gotta beat you down" attitude some interviewers have. Two of the rounds felt somewhat difficult to me. coding: Not counting the resume intro, small talk, and the interviewer showing up late, the actual working time was about 30 minutes. The question involved a nested dictionary…
- A Two-Day Virtual Onsite With Four RoundsDoorDash · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2025
Outsourced recruiter call After the referral went through, I got emails to schedule both the recruiter call and the phone screen. This round was just going over my resume and checking whether there was overlap with the target team — the whole thing was 10+ minutes, but the questions were pretty targeted. Phone screen A senior manager. The problem was DashMart-style — I hadn't looked at any interv…
- a Vague LockingTree Screen That Ran LongAmazon · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Aug 2025
I interviewed for L6 last Friday — I'm probably 80% sure I failed. It was with the Aurora team, and the interviewer ran the whole thing. The interview was scheduled for one hour, but I got tortured for an hour and a half. Right off the bat the guy spent about 10 minutes introducing himself, then had me talk about a time I both challenged and simplified a system — the scope needed to be big enough…
- Aced Five Rounds, Failed on the Resume Deep-DiveBox · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Aug 2025Rejected
A recruiter reached out to me about a Senior SDE position — half development, half DevOps. I didn't have DevOps experience, but I said yes anyway. Round 1 was the technical phone screen, the classic four questions. The interviewer laughed and admitted the questions hadn't changed in years. A system has failed and you can only SSH in to check the logs. The log file is huge — what do you do? Answer…
- 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…
- AKUNA CAPITAL Software Engineer HackerRank OA and live coding screenAKUNA CAPITAL · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Aug 2025
After applying, I was immediately routed into a HackerRank OA that I had to complete in about an hour. Once I finished it, I received an invitation to a first-round technical discussion. It took place over Zoom, and before the call I was sent a coding link where I would write the solution. The flow was fairly standard: an OA followed by a real-time coding screen focused on how I approached the pr…
- An Extra LRU Cache Round After Admitting I'd Seen the First One BeforeAnthropic · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Aug 2025Offer
Overall the questions weren't hard, but there was a lot of code to write. The phone screen was one coding round — they asked the file deduplication problem (Q2), done in Replit. The onsite ended up being 5 rounds total; it was originally supposed to be 4, and they added one more later: Round 1 (Coding): asked about the web crawler problem (Q1). The interviewer asked if I'd seen a similar question…
- Aurora Innovation Software Engineer interview with a 45-minute graph traversal screenAurora Innovation · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2025Rejected
I went through a direct, coding-focused process that came down to timing. After speaking with the recruiter, I completed a coding screen on a CodePad-style platform. I couldn't finish the DSA question within the 45-minute window, so the process stopped there without an offer. The most frustrating part was how close it felt. I knew which direction to take, but I couldn't turn that approach into a…
- Aurora Innovation Software Engineer: Coding Interview Passed, No OfferAurora Innovation · Software Engineer · HR Screen · Aug 2025Rejected
My interview started with a behavioral phone screen, followed by a behavioral conversation with a tech lead and then a coding interview. Everyone I spoke with was genuinely nice and seemed passionate about the project. The overall vibe felt supportive instead of combative. I passed the coding interview, which made me feel optimistic about the later stages. Even so, they chose another candidate. T…
- Breaking Down the Four-Part OAOptiver · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Aug 2025
The Optiver OA is honestly pretty hard. This part is 2 medium-difficulty coding problems plus 1 approximate-solution problem, all in 90 minutes. The problem types lean toward DP (dynamic programming) and heap (priority queue) style problems — testing mathematical modeling, data structure simulation, strategy backtesting, and statistical analysis skills. Approach: before starting a problem, quickl…
- Brex Account Executive interview with mock cold-call roundsBrex · Account Executive · Other · Aug 2025Rejected
My process with Brex didn’t feel smooth, even though it started in a fairly normal way. I went through the usual early screening setup, but the scheduling and follow-through immediately gave me a strange feeling. One calendar invite was outside the availability I’d provided. When I asked questions beforehand, they were mostly brushed off. On the day of the interview, the interviewer was late and…
- Chainlink Labs Software Engineer interview: prolonged process and communication gapsChainlink Labs · Software Engineer · Aug 2025
I ended up in a process that took far too long, and the lack of organization and follow-through really weighed on me. My path included multiple rounds across several days. By the time I was deep into it, it felt like the interviewers kept circling the same themes and repeating questions instead of moving toward anything new. Communication between stages was inconsistent, and I often heard nothing…
- Five Virtual Onsite Rounds, Mostly Behavioral, End in an L4 OfferAmazon · Applied Scientist · New Grad · Onsite · Aug 2025Offer
Background: I'm a non-CS PhD with a CS master's. Earlier this year, after there was a lot of negative news about my advisor, I switched advisors, gave up on academia, and started interviewing. Prep: since I had no internship experience and I'm not a CS PhD, my rule for myself was that I had to land an offer within at most two interviews, so I probably prepared more than I actually needed to. Roug…
- Four Onsite Rounds, Rejected Over a Forgotten ImportOracle · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2025Rejected
Phone screen: break a log into message, timestamp, and level, then query it based on time. Easy-medium difficulty. Round 1 was a bar raiser — pure behavioral questions, around ten of them, all pretty common. Round 2, I don't really remember the specifics of the interviewer, but it was also easy-medium. Round 3 (this is the round I got rejected in): given an array of numbers and a number k, each o…
- Four Onsite Rounds, Rejected Three Days LaterDoorDash · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2025Rejected
The phone screen was two months ago. The question then was [LeetCode] Koko Eating Bananas. I dragged it out for two months before I finally did the onsite. Four rounds. Round 1 was system design. The question was a three-day donation system. This round was 75 minutes long, but the interviewer and I ended up deep-diving into my project until the 45-minute mark before he even got into the design pa…
- Four Technical Rounds, From a Mumbled Zigzag Traversal to a Log-Eviction DesignGoogle · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2025
Round 1: Technical Interview The interviewer was a guy with a really heavy accent, spoke fast, and I had a hard time understanding him. For the whole round I was basically guessing what he was asking. This round was a binary tree traversal question (a LeetCode original or a close variant). The core ask: given the root of a binary tree, implement a zigzag (sawtooth) level-order traversal. This is…
- Four-Round Virtual Onsite RejectionWayfair · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2025Rejected
Behavioral round: standard behavioral questions and conversation. Coding: simple coding with no algorithms involved. Calculate moving costs for different items based on their volume and category. The follow-up was how I would implement this in production. I talked about turning it into classes and then discussed object-oriented design. System design: design Shazam, a system that identifies a song…
- Full-Stack Phone Screen Lands an Onsite InviteAirbnb · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2025In progress
Sharing my full-stack phone screen — I applied for the San Francisco Hybrid position. The process was fast. One week after I submitted my resume, HR scheduled the phone screen. One round, 60 minutes: 40 minutes of live coding followed by 20 minutes of product discussion. The problem was to build a small listing booking widget: Input check-in and check-out dates, calculate the total price Select n…
- Garmin Software Engineer interview with two engineers codingGarmin · Software Engineer · HR Screen · Aug 2025Rejected
I interviewed for a Software Engineer role at Garmin through a fairly lightweight, two-step process that took place over a few weeks. The recruiter phone screen covered my background and included behavioral questions about how I work. In the technical interview, two engineers watched me code a solution to a problem and discuss my approach. The process felt straightforward, but I didn't advance be…
- Interviewer Told Me Mid-Round I'd Failed the Parentheses DP ProblemGoogle · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2025Rejected
Round 1: The input is a string made up of parentheses and numbers, something like "(( ))2 )1( )". Index: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Element: ( ( ) ) 2 ) 1 ( ) Say the index of a number is i — for example the number 2 is at index 4, and the number 1 is at index 6. For a given number, you have to pick: Exactly that many parentheses to remove. For the number 2, you pick two parentheses from before it and rem…
- Karat Software Engineer interview: one-hour live coding and system design sessionKarat · Software Engineer · Other · Aug 2025Rejected
The process started with a short, multiple-choice qualifying test. I could choose topics such as backend, general coding logic, or algorithms and data structures. After I passed, I was invited almost immediately to schedule the actual interview. The main technical interview was a live online video session that lasted about an hour. It combined discussion and analysis questions with a system desig…
- Nearest-Duplicate-Within-K, Then a DFS Question I Didn't FinishMeta · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2025
The first question was to find the nearest matching numbers in an array, where the index distance needs to be within k. Honestly a pretty simple question — basically just use a map to store value-to-index, then do one pass through the array. The follow-up was how to improve the space complexity. My first thought was that I'd need to clear out the earlier entries in the map, so she had me write th…
- Online Assessment, Knapsack DP Timeout Turned Binary SearchMicrosoft · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Aug 2025
I think I probably failed. Two problems in 90 minutes, and right after layoffs they're still running a hiring event, which is honestly a dark joke. The role is general level 62. My first problem was labeled medium difficulty, and the second was said to be harder. But I used knapsack DP for the first problem and it timed out... I ended up rewriting it as binary search right at the wire. They claim…
- Pair Programming Onsite, Rejected for No Unit TestsShopify · Machine Learning Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2025Rejected
The interview was 75 minutes, and you need to have your own coding environment set up ahead of time. The interview question is on GitHub — after cloning it, you write the code locally, then push it back up to GitHub. The problem wasn't very hard, it's basically simple OOP — write a class that implements a feature you can interact with from the command line, it doesn't really involve designing dat…
- Passed the Phone Screen, Tripped Up by an Unusual System Programming Onsite RoundDatabricks · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2025Rejected
I got rejected. Overall the interviewers were all pretty nice, the whole process moved fast, and HR replied quickly too (feels like the grind-heavy companies all reply fast). It's just that they kept using the word "smart" — coworkers are all smart, they only hire smart people. I just wanted nice coworkers; "smart" doesn't really appeal to me at all, it actually made me feel some pressure. It fel…
