Interview Experiences

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

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4 stories

Likes earn the author +10 XP for the first 3 likes each day

BytedanceData ScientistIntern
Mar 2026

Round Two's Same-Day-Duplicate SQL Question

This is my write-up for the second round of the TikTok DS interview (I also have a write-up for the first round, but I won't link it here). The interviewer gave a brief self-introduction. Then I introduced myself and walked through my resume. They dug into things like how I did data preprocessing, how I handled the bias/variance tradeoff, and how I chose performance metrics, and then briefly dug…

Technical Screen0
BytedanceData ScientistNew Grad
Mar 2026

Four HackerRank OA Questions, Cleared in One Pass

TikTok (ByteDance) 2026 new-grad OA on HackerRank, four questions, cleared all of them in one pass. Q1: Given a string, ignoring case, count how many positions have s[i] != s[i+1]. Just walk through it once. Q2: Simulate addition — for each digit, add the digit's contribution directly into the answer. Straightforward simulation, that's all it takes. Q3: Given a 0/1 array, you need to support two…

Online Assessment0
BytedanceData Scientist
Jan 2026

Three Onsite Rounds on Multimodal Deployment and Dropout

Round 1 Discussed how to deploy a multimodal model when compute and GPU memory are limited. Follow-up: given existing captions and embeddings, how to speed up video retrieval. Asked what overfitting is and how to mitigate it. Coding question: implement a MinStack that returns the minimum in O(1) time. Round 2 Discussed methods to mitigate overfitting in deep learning and how Dropout works. Compar…

Onsite0
ByteDanceData Scientist
Oct 2025

Friendlier Than Expected, Then the Headcount Moved

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In progressTechnical ScreenXP0

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.

Share your experience to earn XP