Interview Experiences

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

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26 stories

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AppleSoftware Engineer
Feb 2026

Two Rounds, Pure Coding

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Technical ScreenXP0
AppleSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Nov 2025

Aced Every Round, Rejected at Hiring Committee

The behavioral questions were all situational ones — things like what you'd do if a coworker disappeared and stopped doing their work. But it was all pretty relaxed. The interviewer even said he'd already gathered everything he needed. It felt good overall. Coding round 1 was an intervals problem — similar to one I'd seen in a previous report, where you're given a bunch of [start, end] intervals…

RejectedOnsite0
AppleSoftware Engineer
Nov 2025

Three-Day Onsite Full of Behavioral Questions, Then Ghosted

I got contacted by HR on LinkedIn — the team is based in Austin. The phone screen was with the hiring manager. Two questions, neither of which needed to actually run — you just had to talk through your approach. Not straight off LeetCode, but roughly LeetCode easy level. I interviewed after only a few days of grinding problems, and I still passed, so don't stress about it too much. The onsite was…

No responseOnsite0
AppleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Two Phone Screens, Failed on the Socket Message Round

Two rounds of phone interviews, done on two separate days. The first half of Apple's phone screens is always a behavioral question, which I thought was pretty distinctive. The first round was with an older engineer, kind of serious and not big on smiling, but you could tell he was a senior engineer. The question was to design a hit counter that aggregates how many hits happened in the past 5 minu…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
AppleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Poker System Design, OOD Rock-Paper-Scissors, and Two Hiring Manager Rounds

Coding 1 Design a poker card system, implementing two core methods: shuffle and order. The order method needs to return a sorted list of cards by suit and rank — for example starting with 3 of Clubs, 3 of Diamonds, 3 of Hearts, 3 of Spades, and so on up through Ace. Coding 2 First a relatively simple LeetCode DFS (depth-first search) question, followed by an OOD (object-oriented design) segment w…

Onsite0
AppleSoftware EngineerSenior+
Sep 2025

Passed Five Rounds but Lost to an Internal Hire, Plus Coupang, Databricks, and Mistral AI Along the Way

Background: 5.5 years of experience, all of it at second-tier companies doing infra. Goal: mainly looking to move into AI-related work. Target level is Google L5 equivalent or above. I'm not afraid of a heavy workload, I like healthy competition. Timeline: started grinding problems and sending out resumes from early February, and by early June had gradually started getting offers and wrapped up i…

RejectedOnsite0

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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