Interview Experiences

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

Share yours, earn XP

3 stories

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

PatreonSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Technical Phone Screen on an In-Memory Rate Limiter

The question was the rate limit one. You need to use an in-memory rate limiter to protect an API endpoint. The rate limiter is initialized with a value that represents the maximum number of requests allowed per second. Every time a request hits the API endpoint, it first asks the rate limiter whether there is still capacity to handle the request, and the rate limiter decides based on that whether…

Technical Screen0
PatreonData Engineer
Mar 2026

Easy Phone Screen, HM Chat, Then I Dropped Before the Onsite

Posting my full Patreon loop from February, which I never wrote up. A former coworker referred me into the data team. There don't seem to be many Patreon interview write-ups, so I'm contributing one too. Feb 27: 1st round They gave me a big pile of JSON data that looked like users' personal data, with names, addresses, payment methods and so on, and asked me to do some basic data processing. At f…

WithdrewOther0
PatreonSoftware Engineer
Dec 2025

A Wordle-Style Coding Screen Nobody Warns You About

Not a question from the forum, which surprised me — I'd seen people on the forum say the phone screen here is basically coding rounds, IC/manager rounds, rate limiter, shopping cart, that sort of thing. The problem was roughly a guessing-word game: given a guess word and a target word, mark the status of each position. green: the two chars at this index are the same yellow: the two chars at this…

Technical Screen0

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