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
- Optimizing a Correct C++ Function to Run Under 100 MicrosecondsCitadel · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Aug 2026
The assessment provided C++ source code for a root_node function. Its logic was correct, but it ran extremely slowly. The task was to refactor and optimize it so that it would finish in strictly less than 100 microseconds on large inputs. The original code contained nested loops and operations such as std::find_if and std::advance, producing O(N²) complexity. I needed to reduce that to O(N). It a…
- Pandora Jewelry Account Executive Interview Experience: relaxed in-store customer-service interviewPandora Jewelry · Account Executive · Aug 2026
The process was quick and easy. I was invited to a relaxed in-person interview, sometimes in a small office area behind the store. The staff were professional without being intimidating. They asked about my background, customer service, availability, and why I wanted the role. The discussion did not go deep into role-specific complexity. It was about staying positive and friendly, explaining myse…
- Pandora Jewelry Account Executive Interview Experience: sell charms and braceletsPandora Jewelry · Account Executive · Aug 2026
I went through a fairly structured, retail-style process for the Account Executive role. I applied online, completed a quiz, and was called to the shop for an in-person interview lasting about 20 to 30 minutes. The manager was direct and friendly, asking about my previous experience and a few personal details. The questions weren't all abstract. I was given charms and bracelets on a tray and aske…
- Passing the SDE II Phone Screen After Leadership and Palindrome QuestionsAmazon · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026In progress
I interviewed for the Amazon SDE II position on August 29, 2026. The technical phone screen lasted about an hour. Interview Questions Behavioral: 3 behavioral questions The questions were primarily focused on Amazon Leadership Principles, especially Ownership and Dive Deep I would recommend preparing specific STAR-format examples from your past projects and being ready for follow-up questions. Co…
- Payment Holds, Charges, and Batch ProcessingOpenAI · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026
The question was to design a payment processor. The basic flow was that a merchant first sends a hold request, which we forward to the upstream payment network, then receive an approval or rejection. After a successful hold, there is a separate charge request later. Charges are then grouped by payment network into batch files and sent on a schedule. I'd prepared for payment-system questions befor…
- Phone Screen Piano Keys Coding ChallengeRoblox · Frontend Engineer · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Aug 2026
Phone Interview Coding/design question: Piano Keys Implement a UI with 6 piano keys (C, D, E, F, G, A) that responds to user input. Must be built with vanilla HTML/CSS/JavaScript only — no frameworks or third-party libraries. When a key is pressed and held, it should show a pressed state (i.e., add the pre-styled .key.active class to the corresponding element); when released, it should immediatel…
- Phone Screen Plus a Four-Round Virtual OnsiteMeta · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2026
Meta phone screen + virtual onsite writeup, with the questions and my thought process included. Since I signed an NDA, I'm coding the problem names as homophones — sorry about that. Phone Screen 45 minutes, two questions. The first five minutes were self-intro, and pretty much the rest of the time was spent coding. Question 1, coded 1091: a 2D grid, get from the top-left corner to the bottom-righ…
- Phone Screen Plus Four Rounds Ending in a Bar RaiserOracle · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2026
Phone Interview / Technical Screening A detailed discussion of a project I had done before DSA: Check cycle in directed graph Basic System Design questions Technical Interview 1 Discussion of my current project DSA: Meeting Rooms II OOPs: Design LRU cache HLD Discussion of my current project HLD: a domain-specific system design tied to what the interviewer's team currently works on DSA: Time Base…
- Phone Screen, Virtual Onsite, and Bar RaiserAmazon · Frontend Engineer · New Grad · Onsite · Aug 2026In progress
Amazon 2026 New Grad Timeline and Interview Experience Role: Frontend Engineer, or perhaps Full Stack Engineer. During the interview, the hiring manager said there could be an opportunity to move toward full-stack work within the team later. I just finished interviewing for an Amazon Frontend Engineer role this week. I wanted to share the full process, the interview content, and the resources I u…
- Phone Screens Then Three Onsite Rounds Including an AI Agent Rate LimiterGoogle · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2026
Phone Screen 1: Coding — Car Rental Optimization Given N cars and a set of rental requests, where each request has pickupTime, returnTime, and id, you need to assign cars to these requests to maximize vehicle utilization while using as few cars as possible. The same car can serve multiple requests as long as their times don't overlap. If one request returns the car at time 5 and another picks up…
- Plant-Infection Coding Round Plus an In-Depth Management InterviewOpenAI · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Aug 2026
A friend referred me to a tech + management role that required both domain knowledge and management experience. It was a 60-minute coding round, and the question was the pretty common plant-infection problem. I wrote up three parts of it and ran out of time, and only touched on the fourth part without really finishing it. The interviewer was very quiet, almost no back-and-forth. One thing worth f…
- Positive Crawler Feedback, Then Rejection the Next DayMongoDB · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026Rejected
I have no idea why I failed this interview. I finished both the original question and the follow-up, and the interviewer said both my approach and code looked good. Then I was told the next day that I'd been rejected. Question: Implement: Single-threaded first → Follow-up = find the bottleneck + speed it up with concurrency (= LC 1242 Web Crawler Multithreaded) The interviewer explicitly said the…
- PostgreSQL Averages and HAVING for Resource UsageIBM · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Aug 2026
Write a PostgreSQL query to identify customers whose websites have excessively high average resource usage. Table schemas: The customers table contains id (INT, primary key) and email (VARCHAR(255)). The site_metrics table contains customer_id (INT, foreign key), cpu_usage (DECIMAL(5,2)), memory_usage (DECIMAL(5,2)), and disk_usage (DECIMAL(5,2)). Specific requirements: The report must show custo…
- Power Day Across Two DaysCapital One · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Aug 2026
I had read the Capital One interview reports on the forum and found them very helpful, so I'm sharing some more details to give something back. It was still the four-round Capital One interview, the so-called Power Day, split into case, behavioral, coding, and system design. I spread the interviews over two days. Day one, case interview: The familiar virtual-card-number problem from the forum, wi…
- Priceline Canada Screen with AI and JavaBooking.com · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026
One hour. It started with a conversation about my background and previous work experience, followed by AI-related questions: how I normally use AI tools, how I would design AI into a real workflow, how I would plan an AI workflow, and how to use and prompt an AI agent, including skills, hooks, and similar things. The coding portion used Java. The interviewer provided template code first. The firs…
- Prodapt Software Engineer Interview Experience: OA focused on aptitudeProdapt · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Aug 2026Rejected
My process began with an online assessment meant to filter many people quickly. It was mostly MCQs on attitude and reasoning, including data interpretation, numerical reasoning, and verbal-style questions, plus one medium-to-hard coding problem. The mix felt balanced to me: the aptitude portion could be tricky if I rushed, and the coding problem could easily decide the outcome. I felt reasonably…
- Prodapt Software Engineer Interview Experience: prompt-writing assessment and prototype hackathonProdapt · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Aug 2026
After applying, I went through a structured process that began with an aptitude-style test. It combined quantitative questions, prompt writing, logical reasoning, coding at a medium-to-hard level, and chart-based data interpretation. For the prompt-writing part, I had to describe a scenario and then write an effective prompt for it. After I was shortlisted, I moved to a hackathon-style round wher…
- Product Pages, Trackable Links, and Anonymous UsersMicrosoft · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2026
Design a platform that can provide companies with the ability to create and showcase their product details through dedicated pages while also offering a shareable link feature for dissemination across various social media platforms like Facebook and more. Key Objectives: Companies can create/update product detailed page with images and description. The system can have a robust shareable link mech…
- Project Deep Dive and a Next-Day RejectionPerceptyx · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026Rejected
This round was mainly a project demo / project deep dive. The project could be something from work or something I had built myself. The main task was to explain what I had done, how I had designed and implemented it, what problems I had encountered, and the feature or product's impact and scale. The interview felt more like a conversation than a fixed set of questions. The interviewer kept follow…
- Project Deep Dive, Then a Find-Divisors Follow-upPDT Partners · Machine Learning Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026Withdrew
I interviewed with Citadel Securities (see my previous post) and PDT back to back. I originally wanted to post both back to back too, but something came up and I got delayed. The PDT team is different from the Citadel one. The link they sent was for a research engineer role, but both the headhunter and HR said it would be an LLM team, and it was hybrid 3 days a week, so I was really excited. But…
- Puzzle-Game Assessment, Then a Match-3 and Autocomplete Phone ScreenRoblox · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026In progress
Sharing my Roblox interview experience, hoping it helps everyone. I'm still in the middle of interviewing right now. I applied to Roblox with three years of full-time experience, mass-applying as an experienced hire. I don't know why, but they first gave me an online assessment, which is mostly playing their little puzzle games plus answering some behavioral questions. I have to complain about th…
- Python Palindromes and a Bash find Deep DiveVoleon · Site Reliability Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026In progress
The position is Site Reliability Engineer, so the interview covers Python and Linux. The questions weren't hard, but they really wore me out. Python: given a string, count how many palindrome groups (palindromic substrings) it contains. The correct approach is to scan the string and, from each position, expand outward in both directions. Bash: given a directory, output some deduplicated info abou…
- Quality CARE India Account Executive Interview Experience: a welcoming phone screen and resume discussionQuality CARE India · Account Executive · HR Screen · Aug 2026Offer
My initial interaction was relaxed. I spoke with the team by phone, answered a couple of questions, and they scheduled a more detailed interview within about a week. That next conversation was meant to cover my resume, job history, and career path. The team came across as welcoming in the way they explained the role and its responsibilities. Location: United States. Overall feedback: positive. Of…
- Ranking Design, Two Pointers, and ML FundamentalsMoloco · Machine Learning Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2026Rejected
The phone screen was a conversation with the hiring manager that included a project deep dive and behavioral questions. The onsite included another project deep dive and a system design question related to ranking. The coding question used two pointers to find the longest consecutive run of 1s. The follow-up asked how to handle an especially long input across multiple machines. I was also asked a…
- Rate Limiter in CoderPad, Ran Out of Time Before the Distributed Follow-upSnowflake · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026Rejected
Snowflake phone screen, one hour, writing Python in CoderPad, and I was allowed to use AI. The recruiter said this round looks at how you ask about requirements, how you test, and how you debug. [Question] Build a rate limiting service. Different clients can have different rate limit tiers, for example free, pro and enterprise. The limits for each tier can be updated at runtime without restarting…
- Real-Time Restaurant Analytics Dashboard System Design RoundUber Freight · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2026
System Design Design a real-time Restaurant Analytics Dashboard System requirements: show order volume, top dishes, and revenue for the past 1h, 1d, and 7d. Data must update in real time, and throughput needs to support 100K orders/sec. Primary store schema design: determine the primary storage's tables, partition key, and columns. Cache key design: determine the Redis key pattern and the corresp…
- Recruiter Call to a Four-Round Virtual Onsite, No OfferDoorDash · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2026Rejected
Recruiter call: overall this was standard - basic info questions, no BQ really came up in this round. I recall being asked why DoorDash. Passed in a day or two, then got scheduled for the next round quickly - pretty efficient. Code Craft: a simplified version of Dasher Pay, simplified in that there was no coding extension like a double pay rate window. Instead, after finishing the basic coding, t…
- Recruiter Rescheduled a Month, Rejected After One BQ CallOpenAI · Software Engineer · HR Screen · Aug 2026Rejected
The experience was pretty bad. The recruiter kept rescheduling. I applied in early July and was supposed to get a phone screen about a week later, but she had stuff come up plus vacation, so it didn't actually happen until early August. Then during the call she didn't turn her camera on, and the questions were all behavioral-type stuff — things like how do you manage people, what's a technically…
- Recursive Arithmetic with Invalid Intermediate ResultsJane Street · Software Engineer · Intern · Technical Screen · Aug 2026
An algorithms/LeetCode-oriented question. Problem description: Given a string expression, evaluate it and output the arithmetic result. Restrictions and constraints: Only positive integers are supported. Intermediate-state validation: At any stage of the calculation, if a negative number appears (for example, an intermediate result below 0) or a non-integer appears (for example, division that pro…
- Rejected After AI Coding and Integration + Bug Squash OnsiteStripe · Software Engineer · New Grad · Onsite · Aug 2026Rejected
Writing down my 2027 NG Stripe rejection (and, I think, the most complete set of Stripe NG prep material out there). Timeline 2026.9.3 the role opened and I got a referral from a friend -> 2026.9.4 got the OA -> 2026.9.6 finished the OA, all test cases passed in half an hour -> 2026.9.10 got an email from HR to schedule the Technical Screening -> booked it for 9.16 -> on 9.16 the interviewer had…
