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
- Bain & Consultant Interview Experience: Profit-decline case and behavioral fitBain & · Consultant · HR Screen · Aug 2026
After a recruiter-style HR conversation, I moved into interviews focused on performance as well as conversation. The HR portion lasted about half an hour and covered my background, fit for consulting, why I wanted the role, and working hours. Then I had a manager interview that combined a case drill with behavioral assessment. The case involved analyzing a profit decline and building an improveme…
- Bain & Consultant interview with inconsistent two-person case interviewBain & · Consultant · Online Assessment · Aug 2026
The beginning felt uncertain and drawn out. After an initial assessment step, I completed an online test and then heard nothing for a while. About five weeks later, I was invited to schedule an interview roughly two weeks out. For case preparation, I received a link to a practice platform. The case interview itself was not smooth or enjoyable. I met with two people who seemed to have different ap…
- Bank of America Financial Analyst Interview Experience: HireVue scenario promptsBank of America · Financial Analyst · Online Assessment · Aug 2026
My first step was an online HireVue with behavioral prompts and analytical questions. I had to respond to scenarios as though I were already an employee and decide how I would handle them. That made it less scripted than a simple "tell me about yourself" screen. The process then moved to virtual interviews focused on motivation and my CV. The later round had a similar tone, with personality and b…
- Bank of America Financial Analyst interview with five-question sessionsBank of America · Financial Analyst · Other · Aug 2026Offer
The process felt light from the start. After I was scheduled, I had two back-to-back interviews that took about an hour together. Each was structured around five questions from a prepared list, followed by about five minutes for my own questions. The interviews were straightforward and did not turn into anything tricky or unexpected. I got a clear picture of the role, and it felt like the intervi…
- BD Software Engineer Interview Experience: delayed panels and no follow-throughBD · Software Engineer · Aug 2026No response
I started the process with good intentions, but the lack of coordination became frustrating. I arrived early and waited in the security area while the scheduled interview failed to happen. A text eventually said the hiring manager was on medical leave. Instead of a clear reschedule, another manager interviewed me after a long wait. I followed up expecting at least an acknowledgment, but I receive…
- BD Software Engineer interview with easy assessment and in-person logisticsBD · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Aug 2026
I had a simple process that still felt somewhat inefficient. It began with a fairly easy online assessment, mostly made up of research-and-knowledge questions, followed by an in-person interview. The stages were clear, and it did not feel like a heavy technical gauntlet. In a similar part of the process, I had two interviews: a phone screen followed by an in-person meeting with different people,…
- BHP Software Engineer Interview Experience: Graduate aptitude and mining motivationBHP · Software Engineer · New Grad · Online Assessment · Aug 2026Offer
I applied for a graduate Software Engineer role, and the timeline moved quickly: about four months from applying to receiving the contract. It began with a general aptitude test that relied heavily on maths, pattern-recognition questions, and game-like tasks. Next came an online graduate interview focused on behavior and motivation, including why I wanted to join BHP and what drew me to mining. T…
- BHP Software Engineer interview with timed recorded STAR responsesBHP · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Aug 2026
My first screening step was an online recorded interview with timed responses. The prompts mixed behavioral themes and scenarios, and I had a short preparation window before recording each answer. They covered teamwork, decision making, safety, and problem solving, and felt closely aligned with the company’s values. The questions were short and direct, but the timing made it hard to think calmly.…
- Binary Swaps and a Django Post FixAmazon · Software Engineer · New Grad · Online Assessment · Aug 2026
I took the online assessment. It had two parts. DSA: minimum adjacent swaps for a binary array Given an array containing only 0s and 1s, rearrange it so that all 0s are at one end and all 1s are at the other. Either ordering was allowed: 000...111 or 111...000. In one move, I could swap two adjacent elements. I had to return the minimum number of moves required. For [0, 1, 0, 1], the answer was 1…
- Black & Veatch Software Engineer Interview Experience: hostile manager meetingBlack & Veatch · Software Engineer · HR Screen · Aug 2026Withdrew
I started with an easy, straightforward recruiter conversation. After I followed up, I was scheduled for a second round with two managers in one session. It was mostly a get-to-know-me conversation about my background and projects, and it initially felt like a normal fit discussion. One manager's tone was hostile for no clear reason. It threw me off enough that I withdrew immediately after the in…
- Boomerang Loop With a Surprise ML Platform System DesignAmazon · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2026Rejected
HR reached out about a boomerang interview, two rounds. Round 1: 20 minutes of behavioral questions, 30 minutes of coding. The questions weren't hard, but there were two of them. The first one gave me a graph and asked me to print the shortest path — not hard, but the messed up part was there was no problem description, I had to guess it myself, and there was also some distracting code mixed in t…
- BQ Plus Two Coding Questions in a Referral VOAmazon · Data Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026
Last week's Amazon VO, done through a referral, was BQ plus two coding questions. First the BQ part: How do you handle it when you run into difficulties at work? When your team runs into difficulties, how do you encourage them and come up with a way to solve it? Why did you choose Amazon? Coding part: Coding 1: You're given a string array words. Each word can be written as the concatenation of th…
- Broad Topics, Fast Answers, and a RejectionC3 AI · Data Scientist · Technical Screen · Aug 2026Rejected
Problem Solving How would you predict the amount of food to keep in storage? This was a fairly basic data science case. ML / Algorithms Bias-variance tradeoff Curse of dimensionality Bagging versus boosting PCA Autoencoders Gradient descent How to keep gradient descent from getting stuck in a local minimum How to evaluate RAG Transformers versus RNNs How to calculate the complexity of attention s…
- Browserstack Software Engineer process with three-minute intro videoBrowserstack · Software Engineer · Aug 2026Offer
I had not reached a live interview yet, but I received the email for the next step. It asked for a short introduction video of about three minutes and included a form for my job-timing availability and the date I could start. After I completed that step, I was waiting for the interview rounds to begin. Nothing technical happened on a call. It felt structured around scheduling and availability rat…
- Cadence Design Systems Software Engineer Interview Experience: Memory management and C++ roundsCadence Design Systems · Software Engineer · Aug 2026
I started with a recruiter-style resume discussion and then moved quickly into several technical rounds. The first technical round went deep on memory management and pointer reasoning, with stack and queue problems about how data moves and is processed. The focus was on understanding mechanics, not only producing a final answer. The next technical round was more algorithmic and coding heavy. It i…
- Call Stack Sampling and GPU Weight Distribution System DesignAnthropic · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026In progress
I interviewed this past Thursday. The first question was: given continuous call stack samples, generate timestamped function start/end events. While I was answering, the interviewer kept pushing back with follow-up questions, including things like: How do you compute the change between adjacent call stacks using the longest common prefix? Why do end events go from inside out, while start events g…
- CodeSignal OA and Two Technical RoundsVisa · Software Engineer I · Technical Screen · Aug 2026
CodeSignal online assessment Array operations: given arrays A and B, count the pairs for which A[i] + B[j] equals a specified target. Matrix rotation and boundary handling: rotate an N by N matrix clockwise, then perform special calculations on boundary elements according to specified conditions. String processing and sliding window: find substrings in a long string that match a specified pattern…
- Coding a Stack Interpreter in Vim Without AIRetell AI · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026Rejected
A startup that works on voice AI. The first interview was handwritten Python. I used my own IDE and environment, and any AI or AI suggestion was prohibited. At the time, I did not know how to turn off AI inline suggestions in VS Code, so I had no choice but to write everything in Vim. Problem description The problem was to process a string containing numbers and operators. It included +, -, , /,…
- Coding, System Design, and API Design in One Technical ScreenFora Travel · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026
Coding The question was pretty simple: Q: Given two unsorted integer arrays a and b, where a has enough placeholder positions at the end to hold all elements of b, merge b into a and sort the final array in ascending order. Example: Additional constraints: Both a and b are unsorted a has enough placeholder positions at the end to hold b The final result needs to be placed in a There was no explic…
- Darktrace Account Executive Interview Experience: Promised follow-up never arrivedDarktrace · Account Executive · Aug 2026No response
The experience felt frustratingly unprofessional from the start. After the initial recruiter step, the conversations did not seem organized, and the tone sometimes felt more like a lecture than an interview. One recruiter was overly pedantic and barely asked about my motivation or background. At other points, the hiring manager seemed rushed and disengaged, as though they were not listening to my…
- Debugging, Rewards System Design, AI Coding, Then a RejectionBrex · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2026Rejected
There were three rounds in total. The first round was debugging. You download the project to your local machine and use an IDE you're comfortable with, or you can use CodeSignal. The problem and the bug location were exactly the same as in another post on the forum. Thanks, buddy, although you still have to pretend you don't know the answer and hunt for the bug, which takes some acting 🤡 The seco…
- Deep Leadership Follow-ups, SQL, and Data VisualizationAmazon · Business Intelligence Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026Rejected
I am sharing the BIE phone interview that I just failed. I hope it can help everyone. A senior DE interviewed me and brought along a junior AE. Leadership BQ They first looked at my resume and asked about projects I had done and about leadership. The questions went very deep. After one A/B test, did I run any other tests? What kind of trade-off led to not launching? Which team did I work with? Wa…
- Delayed Feedback in a Binary Search ProblemOpenAI · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026Rejected
This was my OpenAI rejection experience. Both the coding and system design questions may have been new, because I had never seen either one before. The coding problem had two parts, and both seemed related to binary search. In the first part, I had to implement binary search to guess a secret number. There was a function that reported whether my guess was too low or too high, but its response was…
- Dell Tech Laboratories Software Engineer Interview Experience: 90-minute technical and project discussionDell Tech Laboratories · Software Engineer · HR Screen · Aug 2026Offer
The process began with a phone screen with an HR representative. We covered my background and prior experience, why I wanted to apply, and general details about the role and company. About a week later, I had a technical interview with two interviewers. It lasted around 90 minutes and mixed technical problem solving with discussion of my previous projects. They wanted more than correct answers. I…
- Dell Tech Laboratories Software Engineer Interview Experience: Java, Kafka, and product architectureDell Tech Laboratories · Software Engineer · HR Screen · Aug 2026Offer
A recruiter contacted me first, and the process was straightforward and responsive from the beginning. Soon after, I had two technical rounds and an HR round. I used Java, and the questions covered data-structures and algorithms prompts, strings, collections, and concurrency concepts. The second technical discussion looked at how systems work, not only syntax. I explained async architecture and t…
- Designing a 200TB Media Data Transfer PipelineApple · AI/ML Full Stack Engineer · Other · Aug 2026
Question Background The interviewer threw out a fairly open-ended system-design / data-engineering question: You have 200TB of media data (images/videos) that needs to be transferred to compute hosts / a compute cluster for processing (preprocessing, inference, training). How would you design this? There's no standard answer to this one. What it's actually testing is: can you pin down the scope o…
- Downleveled from Senior Staff, Four Rounds, Then SilenceLinkedIn · DevOps Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Aug 2026No response
Back in February or March I applied for a senior staff role at LinkedIn, something pretty close to what I'm doing now. The first round was behavioral, and I've always felt I hadn't quite prepared it right — I leaned too hard on execution. I interviewed at Stripe recently too and got the same feedback. In the end they told me they wanted to downlevel me to staff. LinkedIn's senior staff, on levels…
- Easy Technical Screen on Portfolio Variance, Rejected After a Long WaitD. E. Shaw · Data Scientist · Technical Screen · Aug 2026Rejected
I got rejected after the first round, after a very long wait. I still think it was my resume that got me rejected. The technical questions were pretty easy. The interviewer was super young, felt like a new grad, and felt like they had just woken up. Their hair was still pretty messy, and it felt like they were at home. Honestly, the person who referred me also felt like a new grad. I feel like th…
- Emma (UK) Marketing Analytics Specialist Interview Experience: fast screen and business caseEmma (UK) · Marketing Analytics Specialist · Aug 2026
I started with a quick first conversation of about 20 minutes, mostly to get to know each other. It worked as a fast screen to confirm that I was aligned before moving on. The second interview went deeper into my background and role fit. It also included a business case, so the process felt structured and practical instead of overly theoretical. The difficulty felt average, and the pace matched t…
- Exchange Arbitrage and Quote ThroughputJane Street · Software Engineer · Intern · Technical Screen · Aug 2026
It was a low-level-design problem. Core problem: An Exchange Arbitrage System for stocks. Assume there are multiple exchanges, each with a market feed continuously publishing bid and ask prices for different instruments or stocks. Design and implement an arbitrage strategy. The example gave AAPL on exchange A a bid of \$1.00 and an ask of \$1.10, while exchange B had a bid of \$0.90 and an ask of…
