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
- Zipline Software Engineer onsite cut short by a video setupZipline · Software Engineer · Onsite · May 2026Rejected
My early screens went well, including an initial check with the hiring manager and a coding portion. I was then invited onsite for the final rounds, and that's when the process started to feel badly mismanaged. When I arrived, the interviewers were working from home, so I had to join by video while sitting in a congested, makeshift phone setup. That made the whole experience feel pointless. Durin…
- Zscaler Software Engineer interview: online assessment, group discussion, and two interviewsZscaler · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · May 2026
My process at Zscaler followed a pretty standard structure. It started with an Online Assessment covering aptitude, coding, and communication. After that, I went through a Group Discussion round, followed by two interview rounds focused on knowledge, problem-solving, and teamwork. The overall difficulty felt about average. Even with the group setting, the process stayed straightforward. The inter…
- A 1-Hour OA With Math Puzzles and a Progressive Tax Bracket Coding ProblemInteractive Brokers · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Apr 2026
Last week I got a call from an IB recruiter asking if I wanted to try out for an SDE role. After I confirmed, I quickly got an OA scheduled — one hour. The OA was split into two parts. Part 1 was middle-school-level math multiple choice. F(x) = 3x - 1, f(f(x)) = 1, what's x? Answer: 5/9 I don't remember this one at all — it should have been a pretty simple question. A square is made up of three e…
- A 4-Part 'Todo List for AI' Coding RoundPerplexity · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Apr 2026Rejected
I applied through LinkedIn. The first round was with a recruiter who just asked some basic info, then scheduled a coding round. It had to be done in Python. The coding round question was the "implement todo list for AI" one that's already been posted on the forum. There were 4 parts total. I only got through the first two parts before running out of time. The second part was a pain because every…
- A malloc Phone Screen and a Surprise Debugging RoundOpenAI · Machine Learning Engineer · Onsite · Apr 2026
Sharing an OpenAI interview report. Aside from the phone screen, everything was a question I'd already seen before — because I over-prepared from question banks and cared way too much about the outcome, I interviewed badly. I really regret it. The phone screen covered malloc, which others have already shared — the details aren't much different. There were two parts: first a naive first-fit soluti…
- A Month of Recruiter Ghosting Before One Chaotic Phone ScreenAmazon · Applied Scientist · New Grad · Technical Screen · Apr 2026Rejected
3/13 - recruiter call scheduled, system email assigned recruiter 1 3/15 - rejected, me: ??? 3/16 - recruiter call with recruiter 2, very nice person, said I could set up a mock interview with them, we scheduled a time, then they ghosted 3/17-4/13 - I kept providing my availability, kept hearing "does not meet team calendar," this kept repeating... 4/14 - recruiter 2 was out of office, recruiter c…
- A Recipe Storage CRUD Question with Rules Hidden in the Test CasesCircle · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Apr 2026
I got unlucky — I'd spent a long time studying the bank system and file system problems, and then a brand new question showed up. The question was to design a recipe storage system. Each recipe has a name, a list of ingredients, and a list of steps. First question (I didn't even pass this one, so this is all I have): design the four CRUD methods for this system. The main thing was that the test c…
- A Recruiter Screen and an AI-Assisted Coding ExerciseProfound · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Apr 2026
This place is pretty interesting, they do AI marketing. It's kind of like doing SEO for AI's answers. There were two rounds. The first was with a recruiter, and after chatting for about 15 minutes they asked me to do a coding exercise, and I was allowed to use AI. The problem was roughly: they give you some API endpoints, with docs telling you what each API does, and in the end you pick a few of…
- A Sliding Window OA and a Backtracking Scheduling ProblemWalmart Labs · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Apr 2026
First round OA: LC coding + AI frontend/backend Sliding window / hash map problem, data scale up to 10^5, so it had to be an O(N) solution. Description: A class has many students, and each student has exactly one specific talent. There are talentsCount total types of talent, numbered from 1 to talentsCount. Now we need to form teams for a competition, and each team must include every type of tale…
- A Snapshot Set Iterator and an Interviewer Who Wouldn't Stop InterferingDatabricks · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Apr 2026
Snapshot set iterator — the problem said the return order didn't matter. After I said I needed two data structures — a list of logs and a dict — and laid out my rough approach, the interviewer asked if I had another way to do it. Then he suggested that instead of one shared logs list for all keys, it could just be a dict where each key has its own logs, rather than all keys sharing one list of lo…
- A SQL and Open-Ended EDA Phone Screen, Rejected Days LaterMoloco · Data Scientist · Technical Screen · Apr 2026Rejected
Sharing an interview report for a niche ad company. A recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn about an opening on a Product Analytics Data Science team. Before the interview they sent over a prep doc saying the technical phone screen would cover SQL + Python/R, with the focus on data manipulation, not modeling. The prep doc also mentioned they might ask about past project details and what I learn…
- A SQL Rolling-Average Stumble on the Phone ScreenFetch Rewards · Data Scientist · Technical Screen · Apr 2026Rejected
There aren't many interview reports about this company on the forum, so I'm sharing mine. It was a one-hour phone screen, split roughly half and half between SQL and experimentation. SQL: there were two questions total. I don't remember the exact tables, but one of them asked me to compute the 7-day rolling average of some metric. I got stuck here — the interviewer's correct answer was that you n…
- A Tournament-Ranking Question and the Interviewer's Wrong HintsUber · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Apr 2026
The interviewer's tone was very friendly. For the second question though, I think it's genuinely hard to come up with if you haven't seen something like it before — the corner cases are rough. I went through about six months of interview experience posts and didn't see this question anywhere. It's not even in the LeetCode Uber tag. The problem: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8] represents ranks, where a s…
- Account Executive interview at Grammarly: Competitive offer and fair negotiationGrammarly · Account Executive · Apr 2026Offer
From the beginning, the process felt smooth and fair. Follow-ups were scheduled quickly, everyone showed up on time, and the recruiter kept me updated with clear instructions and timely feedback at each stage. That tone continued in my conversations with the team. Even though the process took time, it never felt messy or stressful. I went through a straightforward set of rounds focused on clarity…
- Airtable Software Engineer interview: spreadsheet-style workflow screenAirtable · Software Engineer · HR Screen · Apr 2026Rejected
My first real step was a recruiter and phone screen combination. The recruiter was responsive and easy to follow, and the phone interview itself felt conversational. The follow-up questions seemed intended to understand how I thought rather than check whether I could recite a familiar pattern. The topic involved an Airtable spreadsheet-style feature. The recruiter had warned me that it wouldn't b…
- AKUNA CAPITAL Quantitative Analyst interview with options lectures and probability questionsAKUNA CAPITAL · Quantitative Analyst · Online Assessment · Apr 2026
Before any live interviews, I went through a mini-lecture series covering trading and options basics. There were three lectures, each paired with an online quiz that I had to complete before moving on. The process felt selective because only the top performers on those quizzes were chosen for the interview round, although they never explained exactly how the "top" threshold was determined. I then…
- AKUNA CAPITAL Quantitative Analyst: Probability, Math, and In-Office Final RoundAKUNA CAPITAL · Quantitative Analyst · Online Assessment · Apr 2026Rejected
I went through a multi-round process that ended with an in-office final step. Before that, the early stages felt like a series of online hurdles that filtered people quickly. Once I reached the last round, the environment felt supportive. Everyone I met in person was nice and made it easier to focus. Probability and math came up repeatedly on the technical side. In the later stages, I was asked m…
- An Interactive HTTP Maze Coding ChallengeChariot · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Apr 2026
I got reached out to by a headhunter by chance — they said it's a company doing a DAF (Donor-Advised Fund) giving platform. I felt the direction was pretty niche, so I went and interviewed. Overall the experience was pretty good, especially their coding question — it's one of the more interesting ones I've seen recently. The question they gave wasn't a traditional Leetcode problem, but an interac…
- An Onsite Design Round That Never Quite ClickedShopify · Software Engineer · Onsite · Apr 2026
Phone screen File system question — needed to support ls/cd/add/remove. All AI-written. Heard back a day or two later that I passed. Onsite Coding: LRU, also AI-written. Didn't feel like there was a fail point there. Past project — they wanted the most recent project, so I didn't bring my most complex one, but it still had some complexity to it. Life story was pretty standard too. Design (maybe t…
- An Onsite Interviewer Who Kept Turning His Camera On and OffGrammarly · Software Engineer · Onsite · Apr 2026
Coding: Design an in-memory key-value store that supports set, set, count(value) (how many keys currently hold this value), begin, commit, and rollback. This interviewer would easily rank as one of the worst interviewers I've ever had. He didn't communicate with me at all the whole time. Here's how it went: he said he was turning his camera off and I should spend a few minutes reading the problem…
- An OOP Recipe and Inventory Coding QuestionStackAdapt · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Apr 2026Rejected
This was more of an OOP-style question, and the problem itself wasn't hard. You're given two concepts. Recipe stores the dish name, how long it takes, and the ingredients it needs. Supply stores ingredients and their inventory counts. A dish can also appear as an ingredient — for example, one dish in Recipe can be used as an ingredient for another dish. Based on this, you implement a series of fu…
- ASML Customer Success Engineer interview with an early end and a separate video assessmentASML · Customer Success Engineer · Other · Apr 2026
The interview got off to a rough start and threw me off right away. The meeting felt awkward and rushed, and I didn't think the interviewer had strong practical familiarity with the job details we were discussing. The conversation barely moved beyond basic prompts, and it ended earlier than planned. I didn't feel I had a fair chance to engage. I had expected a deeper evaluation, but the interview…
- ASML Software Engineer interview through Microsoft Teams with two interviewersASML · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Apr 2026
My interview was concise and conducted online through Microsoft Teams. I spoke with two people who assessed my knowledge and problem-solving while also asking about my background. The questions seemed intended to clarify how I think rather than test whether I could recall concepts from memory. I was comfortable explaining my experience, and the pacing stayed natural. I didn’t get the role, but th…
- BairesDev Software Engineer interview with weeks of silenceBairesDev · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Apr 2026
I went through a structured process for the Software Engineer role: an initial contact, a short screening call, a technical test on their platform, and interviews with technical interviewers and a team lead. The process itself felt fairly standard. After I completed everything, though, communication basically went silent. The uncertainty was the hardest part. I waited weeks without an update, eve…
- Bangalore Loop with Behavioral Questions in Every RoundOracle · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Apr 2026Offer
Where I was coming from My prep ran for a long time, and Oracle wasn't the first company I'd interviewed with. Earlier loops had already shown me which areas I handled well and which ones fell apart, mainly whenever I had to talk through my reasoning calmly while someone was watching. How I studied, and what actually helped The thing that paid off most was coming back to the same material again a…
- Boeing Software Engineer interview with a one-hour behavioral panelBoeing · Software Engineer · Other · Apr 2026Offer
Recruiter outreach led to a virtual interview with several hiring managers. The conversation was heavily behavioral and lasted about an hour. They asked about my background, what I'd done before, and how my experience could benefit the company. I was repeatedly asked to explain my past work clearly instead of simply naming projects. It started with the usual "tell me about yourself" question, the…
- Boeing Software Engineer interview: a recruiter call followed by an offerBoeing · Software Engineer · Apr 2026Offer
After I applied online, a recruiter called me out of the blue, and that call ended up being the interview. It was surprisingly relaxed. I talked through my resume, and it felt more like a conversation than an interrogation. I didn't have to jump through many hoops or sit through multiple rounds, which made the whole thing feel low stress. The recruiter's questions stayed focused on my background…
- Boeing Software Engineer interview: cognitive tasks, phone screen, and panel interviewBoeing · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Apr 2026Offer
The process began with screens that didn't feel like a traditional back-and-forth interview. First, there was an online section with cognitive-style tasks such as mental math and matching objects. I then had a phone screen with real people, where the questions focused more on my background and fit. After that, I had a panel-style virtual interview with several team members. The format was consist…
- Boeing Systems Engineer interview with STAR questions and codingBoeing · Systems Engineer · Other · Apr 2026
I went through two rounds focused on how I worked with other people. Most questions used STAR-style answers as the structure. The hiring managers and team leads asked how I collaborate and handle difficult situations, with a few technical questions mixed in. I came prepared to discuss my projects and felt that my communication could carry me, but the technical portion still affected how the round…
- Bombed Coding, Strong Design Rounds, Follow-ups Before E6 Team MatchingMeta · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Apr 2026In progress
Meta had been on my wishlist ever since it began hiring in Bangalore in February 2025. An old colleague, now an E7, gave me a referral, and through all of 2025 I applied to a wide spread of openings without once checking the level requirements. Job alerts were on, and any new posting got an application from me right away. At some point a recruiter hiring for an E6 role based in London reached out…
