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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
- Passport Validation Form Coding ExerciseStripe · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2025
This problem is basically a passport number validation form. You're given an object that looks something like this: Where L means letters only, D means digits only, and A means alphanumeric (letters or digits). Part 1 – Create a layout. Add a selector with the countries (from the object) as options; add a passport number input field; add a validate button. Part 2 – Create a validate function that…
- Sandbox Print Bug Sank the OA, Rejected AnywayMeta · Applied Scientist · Technical Screen · Aug 2025Rejected
Got an OA, four questions, 90 minutes. It was a banking system. The first question was to write functions for generating accounts, depositing money, transferring money, and so on. The second question was to write a function that sorts all accounts by outgoing transaction volume, then based on an input n, outputs the top n accounts. For example if n=3, you had to output the top three accounts by o…
- Smartsheet Software Engineer interview where a coding round turned into system designSmartsheet · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2025
My Smartsheet process felt unclear in both the way it was explained and the way it actually ran. The recruiter screen went well, and I was told to expect an easy progression into a coding screen. Instead, the round described as a one-hour coding interview turned into system design. The same mismatch continued at the onsite. I had a behavioral round, several hours of coding, and some trivial quest…
- Smartsheet Software Engineer interview with next-day rejectionSmartsheet · Software Engineer · HR Screen · Aug 2025Rejected
I had a pretty typical early sequence: an HR screener followed by a technical interview. In the technical round, I solved everything the interviewer asked me to solve. The next day, I was rejected, which caught me off guard. From the explanation afterward, it sounded like there were many highly qualified candidates, and my performance alone wasn't the deciding factor. That made the whole thing fe…
- Stuck on Debounce in the Autocomplete RoundCoinbase · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2025Rejected
Technical phone screen (1 round) It was a pure whiteboard-style coding round — I had to implement an autocomplete feature for an input box. Requirements: debounce, async fetch, and rendering the results. Follow-up: support keyboard navigation (up/down arrow keys to switch), highlight the selected item, and submit on Enter. I got stuck right at the debounce part — I couldn't get the event handler…
- The Referral Chain Leaderboard ProblemRobinhood · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2025
Robinhood's referral program is pretty well known. The task is to build a dashboard to track the state of the referral program, specifically to understand how people refer others through a referral chain. Assume a person refers everyone below them in the chain. For example, A refers B, C, and D in a referral chain A -> B -> C -> D. Build a leaderboard showing the top 3 users with the most referre…
- Three Onsite Case Studies on Private Accounts, Carpooling, and NetflixMeta · Data Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2025
The overall experience was okay — at least all the interviewers were superficially friendly. But two of them were more than 5 minutes late. For every product sense question, they'd first ask you how you understood the product, then ask what dimensions there were (at this stage they just wanted a high-level list of entities), and finally what metrics you'd use. The first question was a new one, ab…
- Three Onsite Rounds of BQ, Coding, and OODAmazon · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2025
Round 1: Asked 6 behavioral questions, covering a pretty wide range. The ones I remember are: How to handle a tight deadline Proactively helping others (help others) Digging into a problem's root cause (deep dive) How to handle disagreeing with a colleague (conflict with colleague) Doing something outside your scope (outside your scope) How to respond to negative/harsh feedback Round 2: Two codin…
- Three Onsite Rounds With a Bar Raiser and Nonstop BQ ChallengesAmazon · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2025
Round 1 (possibly a bar raiser): The interviewer gave me 2 BQs and 2 coding questions. BQ1: tell me about your project... follow up... BQ2: don't remember. Coding1: given an int array where only one number appears an odd number of times, find and return that number. I used a hash table -> follow-up: how do you optimize the space complexity to O(1)? I got stuck on this one for a while, we went bac…
- Three VO Rounds, Then Radio Silence After HRTikTok · Software Engineer · HR Screen · Aug 2025No response
A recruiter reached out to me in July for a team hiring push. I did three rounds of VO interviews, plus one round with a Talent Partner about salary expectations. Feedback on every earlier round came back fast, basically the next day, but ever since the HR call it's been almost a week with no word — feels like I've been shelved in the talent pool. I really don't want to give up, but there doesn't…
- Two LeetCode Easy Rounds, Then a BQ Round That Was Really a Technical InterviewDeutsche Bank · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2025Rejected
This is from an interview I had two months ago. The first two technical rounds were each 1 hour, with 2 interviewers per round, and both interviewers asked questions. Each round had one question, both original LeetCode Easy problems — one was checking whether two trees are the same, the other was valid parentheses. Then you had to write test cases. Probably because I was using Java, the interview…
- Two Phone Screens, Rejected in ML System DesignRunway · Machine Learning Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2025Rejected
Sharing an interview experience for a lesser-known company. It's a video generation startup that seems to be doing pretty well lately. I mass-applied to one position, but the recruiter contacted me about a different role instead. There were two phone screens total, both 45 minutes. Round 1 was coding: implement an ngram class with fit and generate methods. fit reads a file and counts ngrams, and…
- Two Phone Screens, Then a Week of Silence Before RejectionNetflix · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2025Rejected
Rejected. It doesn't feel like a hard fail — after the interview it took about a week to hear back, and when I followed up, HR said they were syncing up with the team, and in the end told me they were moving on with other candidates. My own sense is that I didn't perform badly, but definitely not perfectly — there were various small issues where I didn't give the optimal answer right away, or I m…
- 100% on the OA, Rejected After the Technical RoundAdyen · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Jul 2025Rejected
There isn't much Adyen interview experience on the forum, so let me contribute mine. I'd never heard of Adyen and didn't even know they hire in the US — they have an office in Chicago and require onsite for a few days. Interview process: HR -> HackerRank OA -> Technical -> System Design -> Leadership -> Board The OA had two questions: the first was LRU, the second was similar to combination sum,…
- A File System Design Screen With a Confusing InterviewerHarvey · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Jul 2025In progress
The file system question that's been going around the forum. Here's my report. Similar to a file system — implement two functions: addFile(String path): given a string like "path/to/somewhere/file.txt", store this file. getFile(String path): given "path/to/somewhere", return the content of file.txt; given "path/to", return the folder "somewhere". There wasn't much of a self-introduction, we jumpe…
- A GPU Credit Coding Question, Then a Surprise Fullstack Design RoundOpenAI · Software Engineer · Onsite · Jul 2025In progress
The coding round was the GPU credit problem, and it was actually pretty simple — the whole thing was only about 30-40 lines of code. add_credit subtract get_balance Three functions. I used two heaps to maintain the credit entities and the subtraction events. The first two functions were just simple heappush calls. get_balance was a little more complex — mainly because subtract needs to prioritize…
- A Hiring Manager Round Built Around One Experimentation CaseTikTok · Data Scientist · Technical Screen · Jul 2025
Round 1: HR screen, pretty much a normal phone screen — confirmed my work experience and visa status. Round 2: Hiring manager. This round had no coding (not sure if that counts as weird...). First 25 minutes: deep dive into my resume, lots of "why" questions about my project experience. Last 25 minutes, the case was: They want to launch an experiment testing a new version of a recommendation algo…
- A Level-Up Coding Screen Building a Bank SystemMeta · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Jul 2025
There were four tests total, in a format similar to a design question, but they weren't given all at once — it was level-up style. You only get the next question once you pass the test cases for the current level. The whole time you're required to share your entire screen, with camera and mic on. I didn't manage to finish. I think the main difficulty was time management, and the fact that each ti…
- AKUNA CAPITAL Software Engineer HackerRank OA, coding rounds, and final dayAKUNA CAPITAL · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Jul 2025
I went through an OA and then a series of technical rounds that ended with a demanding final day. The initial HackerRank assessment was followed by an exchange-engine-style coding focus in a later interview, where I had to implement a simplified version and explain what I was doing as I went. By the final stage, the interviews were intense and back-to-back. There were four in a row, including tec…
- an LRU-Based Event Scheduler ScreenApplied Intuition · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Jul 2025
HR reached out to me on LinkedIn, and we scheduled a round right away. Not a tag question. Say you have a job scheduler that processes events. The input is a timeout value and a stream of events, and you need to figure out which events time out. Events come in three modes: start, end, and ping. A ping updates an event's status, and if the time between an event's last update and the current time e…
- Bar Raiser Behavioral Marathon, a Parking Lot OOD, and Route-Planning CodingAmazon · Software Engineer · Onsite · Jul 2025
Round 1: it went straight into bar raiser mode, five BQs back to back for the whole round, totally overwhelmed me. The ones I roughly remember: most interesting/proud project, dealing with ambiguity, conflict/different opinions, how to make your work more efficient (something like that? I used "prioritize things"), and the most challenging thing you've dealt with. Tons of follow-ups, and the inte…
- Behavioral, Technical Screen, and a Week-Long CodeSignal AssessmentDatabricks · Solutions Architect · Take-home Project · Jul 2025
A while back, a recruiter from Databricks reached out about a Solutions Architect position. Since it had some relevance to my background, I figured I'd interview for it and give it a shot, so I wanted to share my fresh-off-the-press interview notes with everyone — hope this helps. The first round was a behavioral interview with the hiring manager, mainly talking about my past experience along wit…
- Crypto System Design, a Handwritten Iterator, and a Food Delivery Coding RoundCoinbase · Software Engineer · Onsite · Jul 2025
Virtual onsite: System Design -> Pretty much the same as a version of this question that's been reported before. It's designing a crypto currency trading system, with a third-party exchange, using a sync API to interact with that third-party exchange. I had prepared something similar before. But the interview still had some stumbling — I felt my understanding was a bit off, and only figured it ou…
- Dropbox Product Manager interview: offer withdrawn after VP roundDropbox · Product Manager · HR Screen · Jul 2025Withdrew
My loop started with a long setup: a recruiter call, followed by Zoom conversations that combined case-study work with situational questions. I spoke with a hiring manager and then had a more technical conversation with an engineering manager. After that came a presentation-focused stretch. I met with several product managers to present a case study and also had a culture discussion with product…
- Efficient Process, Rejected the Next DayBloomberg · Product Manager · Technical Screen · Jul 2025Rejected
Fresh rejection from Bloomberg. A recruiter reached out on LinkedIn. They quickly scheduled the first round, an HR sync, about 30 minutes. They asked about my general work experience, whether I owned the roadmap, whether I had experience launching products globally, how I worked with cross-functional teams, and what the product I owned was like. They walked me through the overall interview proces…
- Four Onsite Rounds in One DayMeta · Data Engineer · Onsite · Jul 2025
Four rounds total, all held on the same day, with a lunch break in between: Round 1: ETL technical Round 2: Data modeling Round 3: ETL technical (leaning more toward real-time processing) Round 4: Behavioral + ownership-related HR calls ahead of time to explain what each round covers, so the overall schedule is pretty clear. The first two rounds lean toward data modeling and traditional batch pro…
- Four Rounds, Manager Round Was the ToughestTikTok · Product Manager · Intern · Onsite · Jul 2025Offer
Getting through all 4 rounds of the intern interview process was genuinely not easy. After I finished, I felt like my English and my structured way of speaking had leveled up dramatically. I got the interview invite from HR on LinkedIn. After we scheduled a call, they walked me through the role details and the interview process. Round 1: Full self-introduction in English. For the questions after…
- Four Rounds, Team Shutdown, and a Month-Long Wait for RejectionAdobe · Software Engineer · Onsite · Jul 2025Rejected
I finished interviewing right before they shut down the team at the end of last month. Then the HM took a two-week vacation, and after waiting almost a month, I got the classic "they were touched but rejected me anyway" treatment — moved to another candidate. It was for the AEP team, a referral pit from a friend. Four rounds total, overall not too hard. The first round was billed as tech/coding,…
- Four-Round Onsite, Rejected After a System Design Round I Hadn't Prepped ForMeta · Software Engineer · Onsite · Jul 2025Rejected
March 26: first round, the screen. Two medium questions — one I'd never seen before, and the other was a variant of vertical order traversal. I'd actually only grinded 32 problems total, and somehow I passed. Still feels like a miracle. Onsite was on the 2nd. Let me update on that too. Four rounds total, as follows: System design. The interviewer was very nice, and the topic happened to be a syst…
- Four-Round Virtual Onsite With an Incident SimulationDoorDash · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Jul 2025Rejected
Virtual Onsite, four rounds total. First round simulated handling an Incident. Second round System Design, third round Coding, fourth round HM (Hiring Manager). Incident Assume we own a payment integration service. Internally, various services call us to make payments, and downstream from us is a financial institute. The current incident shows our service is abnormal, with high CPU and memory usa…
