Interview Experiences

Real candidates, real loops: every round, what was asked, and how it ended.

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45 stories

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AnthropicSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

A Web Crawler Question That Turned Into a Late Multithreading Push

Phone screen, and there's a problem on LeetCode that's almost identical to what they asked. Write a web crawler that only scrapes pages under the same hostname. The URL they gave me was for a real website (I think it might have been their CEO's blog?). The interview format was a bit different though — he didn't have me jump straight to writing multi-threaded code. You do it single-threaded first,…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
AnthropicEngineering ManagerSenior+
Sep 2025

Cut in the Management Style Round

I interviewed for an L6-7 EM role, in the pretrain org. The technical rounds were: project retrospective system design There were 3 non-technical rounds: management style strategy and execution culture The project retro was the only round with an actual engineering leader from the relevant area sitting in, and I felt like that one went pretty positively — they asked some pretty sharp questions. T…

RejectedOnsite0
AnthropicSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

In-Memory Banking OA, Then a Surprise LLM Classifier Screen

After mass-applying online, HR reached out really fast — they basically sent the OA in the second week. The OA was pretty simple: design an in-memory banking system, four levels total. There's discussion of this question all over the forum. The first level was designing three functions: add account, pay, and deposit. The logic was simple — just define a dict to track accounts and balances. The se…

Technical Screen0
AnthropicSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

A Two-Part Phone Screen and a DIY Attention Algorithm on the Virtual Onsite

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RejectedOnsitePremium0
AnthropicSoftware EngineerSenior+
Aug 2025

An Extra LRU Cache Round After Admitting I'd Seen the First One Before

Overall the questions weren't hard, but there was a lot of code to write. The phone screen was one coding round — they asked the file deduplication problem (Q2), done in Replit. The onsite ended up being 5 rounds total; it was originally supposed to be 4, and they added one more later: Round 1 (Coding): asked about the web crawler problem (Q1). The interviewer asked if I'd seen a similar question…

OfferOnsite0

What are interview experiences?

An interview experience is a candidate's own account of a hiring loop — not a question bank entry. It tells you the shape of the process: how many rounds there were, what each round actually tested, how long the gaps between them ran, and what the recruiter said at the end. That context is the part a question list cannot give you.

How to read them

Weight recent write-ups more heavily — interview loops change, often within a year. Read several for the same company and role rather than one: a single account tells you what one interviewer asked, while five tell you what the bar is. Note the outcome badge too, since a rejection write-up usually explains the gap far more precisely than an offer one.

Share your own

Every published experience earns 50 XP, and each of the first 3 likes it receives in a day earns you 10 XP more. Likes must come from established accounts; like-for-like swaps and likes from your own second account are not paid. Write it while the details are fresh — the round order, the exact prompts, and how much time you were given are what the next reader needs.

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