Netflix Software Engineer Interview Experience — Two Back-to-Back Coding Rounds and a No-Feedback Rejection

The questions were different from every interview report I had seen.

There were two back-to-back interviews.

First phone round — problem solving:

Question: The ping times between cities are different. Starting from one city, find the fastest paths for broadcasting to every other city.

Solution: Dijkstra's algorithm.

Follow-up: If the ping times keep changing, how should the paths be updated?

Solution: Ramalingam-Reps dynamic single-source shortest paths.

I wrote Dijkstra's algorithm immediately with no bugs, but apparently that still was not enough for the interviewer. I did not produce the optimal follow-up solution, and I suspect that was why I was eliminated.

Second-round coding:

Question: Design and implement a key-value cache with automatic expiration. It was essential to clarify whether the cache shared one expiration policy or whether every entry had its own expiration time. If the interviewer let me decide, the better choice was an independent expiration time for each entry.

Follow-up: What if memory is full?

Solution: Expire the oldest cache entry.

The interviewer stayed stone-faced and was difficult to understand throughout. Even though the problem statement was incomplete, the interviewer refused to cooperate with my problem exploration.

I kept swallowing the frustration and pushing forward, but I could not overcome the interviewer's walnut-sized reasoning. I was treated like a language model throughout and was repeatedly told to summarize what I had done so far and explain my plan again. I proactively wrote tests, including an exception test case, and was still treated as though the code did not work. For a moment, I genuinely could not tell whether the behavior was simply foolish or deliberately hostile.

That was a precious full hour of my life. I had to write code, narrate my reasoning, and repeatedly dumb down the explanation as though speaking to a five-year-old, all at once. If someone with that much personality were actually on my team, I doubt I could carry the collaboration. I was furious and left with a terrible impression of the interview process.

I was rejected three days later with no feedback. Good. Becoming coworkers would have meant dealing with this every day.

Several days later, I heard about layoffs at Netflix and looked up at the sky laughing in celebration.