Interview Experiences

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

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4433 stories

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StackAdaptSoftware Engineer
Apr 2026

An OOP Recipe and Inventory Coding Question

This was more of an OOP-style question, and the problem itself wasn't hard. You're given two concepts. Recipe stores the dish name, how long it takes, and the ingredients it needs. Supply stores ingredients and their inventory counts. A dish can also appear as an ingredient — for example, one dish in Recipe can be used as an ingredient for another dish. Based on this, you implement a series of fu…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
DoorDashSoftware Engineer
Apr 2026

System Design, a Dasher Debugging Round, and an AI Pair-Programming Round

SD round - from the prep notes, a food review system. Debug round - also from the prep notes. The question was about adding a dasher and randomly picking a dasher. The bugs included, roughly: A boundary issue when the map is empty A logic issue: when you delete a randomly-selected key from the map, you need to move the last element into the deleted slot and update the index. If you don't handle t…

Onsite0
TemuData EngineerSenior+
Apr 2026

Stood Up by the Interviewer, Then Rejected a Month Later

Locked — open it to unlock the full story with XP.

RejectedTechnical ScreenXP0
UberSoftware Engineer
Apr 2026

Two OA Questions in 90 Minutes

90 minutes, two questions. Question 1: Balanced Numbers You're given a permutation array of 1 to N. For each length k from 1 to N, determine whether the k elements in the permutation whose values fall in the range 1 to k are exactly contiguous in the original array. Return a string of '1' and '0' indicating whether each k satisfies the condition. Question 2: Minimum Reversal You're given a direct…

Online Assessment0
RobinhoodSoftware Engineer
Apr 2026

Three Onsite Rounds, Rejected With No Feedback

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RejectedOnsiteXP0
TemporalSoftware Engineer
Apr 2026

Rude System Design Interruptions and a Concurrency Question I Couldn't Solve

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Technical ScreenXP0
ShopifyData Scientist
Apr 2026

Data Viz Case, App Store Marketplace Case, and Life Story

The questions are the same as what's already covered in other interview reports out there, so I'll just add some extra details. Data Interpretation They start by showing you a chart of weekly session count over the past 3 years, with a spike around May, and ask you to give a hypothesis for it. Then they add conversion rate to the same chart, plus another metric (I forget exactly what it was) — at…

Onsite0
AmazonData ScientistIntern
Apr 2026

Two Back-to-Back Virtual Onsite Rounds

This interview was purely a case of getting lucky. I got the interview invite on 4/12, then had two VO (virtual onsite) rounds back to back on 4/22, with no break in between. Both interviewers held PhDs. VO1 Standard LP (Leadership Principles) questions, and then they dug into a lot of detail based on my answers. Tell me about a most recent project Calculated risk A time you needed to extend a de…

In progressOnsite0
OpenAIMachine Learning Engineer
Apr 2026

Four One-Hour Rounds in a Single Phone Screen

Sharing my recent OpenAI Research phone screen. Round 1: general coding, 1hr Debug a distributed system. They gave me a buggy job scheduler written in Python — I had to check for data races, deadlocks, lock contention, and whether the rate limiter was implemented correctly. Partway through I had to write my own test cases to confirm the scheduler actually worked, then calculate how long the sched…

In progressTechnical Screen0
RipplingSoftware Engineer
Apr 2026

Three Onsite Rounds and the Fastest Feedback I've Seen

I'm giving back to the forum. It took me 6 months of searching, but I finally landed an offer. I have 3 years of experience and interviewed for an SDE II role. Recruiter Pretty standard: why are you looking for a new opportunity, why Rippling, an introduction to the company, and then questions about sponsorship needs. Coding For the coding round, you can choose to use AI or write the code by hand…

OfferOnsite0
Hudson River TradingQuant Researcher
Apr 2026

A 45-Minute CodeSignal C++ OA

Locked — open it to unlock the full story with XP.

In progressOnline AssessmentXP0
CircleSoftware Engineer
Apr 2026

A Recipe Storage CRUD Question with Rules Hidden in the Test Cases

I got unlucky — I'd spent a long time studying the bank system and file system problems, and then a brand new question showed up. The question was to design a recipe storage system. Each recipe has a name, a list of ingredients, and a list of steps. First question (I didn't even pass this one, so this is all I have): design the four CRUD methods for this system. The main thing was that the test c…

Online Assessment0
LyftSoftware EngineerSenior+
Apr 2026

Onsite Went Fine, Hiring Manager Call Was Discouraging

First, the technical screen. It was a sliding window LeetCode hard, but honestly not that hard — it was just 76, Minimum Window Substring. Next came the onsite, three rounds total. The first round was coding. The first 15 minutes were spent talking about past projects, then 60 minutes on the problem, and the last 15 minutes was free-form chat. The problem: given a set of jobs, each with a start t…

Onsite0
OpenAIMachine Learning Engineer
Apr 2026

Four Technical Problems, Told Not a Match

Question 1: 1NN This one's got a lot of write-ups already on the forum, so I won't go into detail here. Question 2: Infectious disease The first three parts were exactly the same as what's already on the forum. The fourth part: at any given moment, for a plant that isn't dead yet, if it has >=K infected neighbors, it enters a dead countdown (dies after D days); if it has >=T but <K infected neigh…

RejectedOnsite0
CoinbaseSoftware Engineer
Apr 2026

Three OAs, a Block-Mining Coding Round, and Two AI-Assisted Rounds

I heard Coinbase had layoffs today. Not sure how that'll affect hiring. Sigh, hope everyone's okay. The people I dealt with, including HR, were all really nice. Sharing my previous interview experience — the whole process. HR reached out asking if I wanted to interview with Coinbase (I'd applied 4 years ago but never went further in the process — they might still have had my info), so I went ahea…

Onsite0
IMCSoftware Engineer
Reported Apr 2026

IMC Software Engineer interview with no update after round two

After I got through the early stages, the process seemed to be moving normally. I completed what I believed was round two and waited for the next step. The silence afterward threw me off. I never received an official message saying that I hadn’t made it to round three. Instead, I was left to infer what had happened, with no real closure. The lack of communication made the experience drag on even…

0
CloudflareSoftware Engineer
Reported Apr 2026

Cloudflare Software Engineer interview with Battleship coding and Austin office tour

My process took long enough that it started to feel like the goalposts were moving. It began with a hiring manager call, followed by a live coding round where I built a Battleship-style game. Then came a larger loop with an "orange cloud" behavioral interview, a debugging discussion, a system design conversation, and a PM-focused interview. I also had another hiring manager conversation that incl…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
VantaSoftware Engineer
Reported Apr 2026

Vanta Software Engineer interview with a 4-of-6 online assessment

I passed the resume screen and then took an online assessment, but my process ended there. I got 4 out of 6 questions correct and was partially correct on a fifth. The problems were mostly about arrays, along with two-pointer problems and two grid-based questions. The test made it clear what they were evaluating, and I didn't score well enough to move on. The process didn't stretch across multipl…

RejectedOnline Assessment0
BoxSolutions Engineer
Reported Apr 2026

Box Solutions Engineer interview: manager conversation with little room to respond

The process had a disappointing start. The first round was a conversation with a manager, but the interviewer was so quiet that it didn't feel like a dialogue. I didn't get much chance to explain my experience before the call moved on. From my perspective, it wasn't a serious evaluation of fit or skills. I felt as though I wasn't allowed to contribute, and I didn't move forward afterward. What I…

RejectedOther0
ZiplineSoftware Engineer
Reported Apr 2026

Zipline Software Engineer interview: seven-round onsite after take-home

The process started with a technical interview with a senior team member and quickly moved into a comprehensive take-home assessment. I felt good after passing that stage, and then I was invited to an intensive onsite at the South San Francisco office. The onsite was the heavy part, with seven distinct rounds covering technical and behavioral topics. The structure showed that they were evaluating…

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.

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