Interview Experiences

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

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4457 stories

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StripeSoftware Engineer
May 2026

A Fresh OA on Deployment Window Scheduling

Fresh OA! The question was to build a deployment time window scheduler. Time is represented uniformly as minutes within a week, in the range 0 to 10079: 0 means Monday 00:00, 60 means Monday 01:00, and 10079 means Sunday 23:59. All intervals are left-closed, right-open [start, end). There are two kinds of windows in the input: allowed: times when deployment is permitted freeze: times when deploym…

Online Assessment0
InstacartSoftware Engineer
May 2026

Karat Phone Screen, Rejected Two Weeks Later

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RejectedTechnical ScreenPremium0
Two SigmaSoftware Engineer
May 2026

Order Matching Coding Round Plus a GenAI Manager Round

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RejectedTechnical ScreenXP0
AdyenMachine Learning Engineer
May 2026

Two Technical Rounds, a Broken HackerRank Link, and a Rejection

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RejectedTechnical ScreenXP0
AnthropicSoftware Engineer
May 2026

OA Take-home Then a File-Duplicate Phone Screen

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Technical ScreenXP0
CoinbaseSoftware Engineer
May 2026

Mempool Block-Mining Problem in the First Technical Round

A former coworker referred me, and HR contacted me about three weeks later. The first round was technical. Part one Cryptocurrency "mining" is the operation where a "miner" places "transactions" in a candidate "block". Each block has a fixed size B = 100. At any point in time there is a set of transactions available for mining in an unordered array called the mempool. A transaction can be describ…

Technical Screen0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
May 2026

Two Onsite Rounds, Now Heading to Team Match

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In progressOnsiteXP0
RobloxMachine Learning EngineerSenior+
May 2026

Three VO Rounds, Zero Feedback, No Idea Why I Failed

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RejectedOnsiteXP0
MicrosoftSoftware Engineer
May 2026

Phone Screen, Three Onsites, and a Template Rejection

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RejectedOnsiteXP0
RedditBackend Engineer
May 2026

Load Balancer Deep-Dive and a One-Week Offer

General coding 1: the Report Chain problem General coding 2: the Tennis Game problem — afterward the interviewer also chatted with me a bit about the strategy pattern Backend programming: the Load Balancer problem: It's split into four parts, and they give you a codebase. Part 1: The load balancer keeps getting error code 500. You need to find the cause — the cause is that the LB has the hostname…

OfferTechnical Screen0
DatabricksSoftware Engineer
May 2026

Phone Screen on a Multi-Bookstore Price Aggregator

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In progressTechnical ScreenXP0
CitadelSoftware Engineer
May 2026

Two First Rounds and Progressive Matrix Questions

I asked a lot of people, and they all said they had two first-round interviews. I received both as well, but I did not make it to the second round. The first one: I was asked only one question: share some especially difficult problems you worked on recently and explain them. For the coding portion, a prefix tree or trie was enough to solve it. The question was very similar to a search suggestion…

RejectedOnsite0
GoogleSoftware EngineerNew Grad
May 2026

Technical Screen With a Verbal-Only Second Question

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Technical ScreenXP0
Capital OneProduct Analyst
May 2026

Rejected After Stumbling on the Venmo Case Math

Since a lot of people on the forum helped me out a lot, I'm still posting this report even though I ended up getting rejected, which is a shame. Behavior: The usual three — success, helping others, and failure. Remember to prepare detailed examples, there will be follow-ups. DC: I made slides, mostly focused on visualization, since at my current job I present to an MD every day so this felt famil…

RejectedOnsite0
WeRideSoftware Engineer
May 2026

Four Rounds, Then an Invasive Team-Match Round

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RejectedOnsiteXP0
RipplingSoftware Engineer
May 2026

An Extensible Expense Rule Engine

In the Rippling phone coding interview, I was given a set of expenses and rules. I needed to run every rule against every expense and identify each rule that the expense violated. An expense looked like this: Example rules included: Total expense should not be greater than 175. A restaurant seller should not have an expense greater than 45. An entertainment expense should not be charged. The meth…

Technical Screen0
SquarepointJunior Discretionary Trader
May 2026

A Rough One-Hour Phone Screen and a Fast Rejection

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RejectedTechnical ScreenXP0
DatabricksForward Deployed Engineer (FDE)Senior+
May 2026

Cold Recruiter Screen, Rejected Before I Parked the Car

Databricks recruiters are really arrogant. I took the recruiter's call today while driving to the office, and it turned out to be the right call — I didn't waste much time. I'd honestly forgotten when I casually applied for this senior FDE role. Right off the bat she asked, coldly: "Where are you located, specifically which city?" I said I was in the Bay Area — I was worried that naming a specifi…

RejectedHR Screen0
InstacartBackend EngineerSenior+
May 2026

A 5-Part OA That Was Basically Vibe-Coding With Claude

I've compiled some tips I saw online and added my own experience. The deadline was two weeks. What surprised me was that this OA was completely different from the Instacart OAs I had seen discussed before. It was a 5-part assessment, and the overall format felt more like "AI-assisted full-stack feature implementation" than a traditional coding assessment. Time limit was 90 minutes. The assessment…

RejectedOnline Assessment0
MercorApplied AI Engineer
May 2026

Referral Network Coding and a Live Search System Build

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RejectedOnsiteXP1

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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