Interview Experiences

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

Share yours, earn XP

4 stories

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

ZipHQSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

A Graph Pursuit Problem in the First Round

The author reports being rejected after a first-round Zip interview focused on a pursuit game in a finite undirected graph. Two players know each other’s locations and can move to an adjacent room or stay still, with the evading player acting first. The question concerned how long capture could take. After the applicant struggled, the interviewer suggested comparing travel distances from the two…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
ZipHQSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

AI-Assisted Onsite Coding on an Expense Reimbursement Codebase

It was roughly three small problems. They gave us a codebase, but it had so many files that there was no way to read through all of it, so basically you have the AI read and write everything. It was a simple system for managing company expense reimbursements, with features like monthly expense and budget reports. The first problem was that the monthly report data was wrong, for example someone fi…

Onsite0
ZipHQSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Backend Practical on a Questionnaire Evaluator, Rejected

After HR reached out to me, we scheduled the backend practical interview. Questions: adding features on top of a questionnaire parsing system and condition evaluator Part 1: enable numeric question input and condition evaluator (in addition to text input) enable functionality create new test cases Part 2: enable multiple condition evaluation Enable AND/OR on different conditions of different ques…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
ZipHQSoftware Engineer
Aug 2025

Aced the HM Round, Failed a Simple Tree DP Problem

Overall the difficulty was pretty easy — too bad I failed this tech round. Tech round: a tree problem. Each node has a value. For each node, you can pick either the current node's value, or the values of its children. If you pick the current node, you can't also pick its children — return the maximum value sum. The core of it is really just getValue(root): return max(getValue(root), getVal(root.c…

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.

Share your experience to earn XP