Software Engineer Interview Experience — Reported Spreadsheet Variants Across Ten Companies

·Software Engineer·Sep 2026
OnsiteTechnical ScreenOnline Assessmentmedium

The author brings together 31 interview reports involving ten companies, including OpenAI and Harvey, to compare spreadsheet implementation questions. The compilation covers basic cell access, formulas, dependency updates, circular references, and the choice between calculating values during reads or maintaining cached results during writes.

It attributes different extensions to different employers: fixed grid dimensions and string concatenation, raw and calculated views, extensible aggregation operations, and spreadsheet column naming. Testing, cache invalidation when cell types change, and error behavior also receive attention. The author recommends clarifying supported operators, empty-cell handling, cycle reporting, and expected read/write workloads before choosing an approach. This is a comparison of reported interview material across assessments, screens, and onsite sessions; it does not describe one applicant completing a single interview process.

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Curated and edited by PracHub

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Interview at a glance

Role
Software Engineer
Rounds
Technical Screen → Onsite → Online Assessment
Difficulty
medium
Interview date
Sep 2026
Questions from this interview
5 questions

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