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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UberSoftware Engineer
Mar 2026

OA, Phone Screen, Then a Four-Round Onsite

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

In progressOnsiteXP0
Scale AISoftware Engineer
Mar 2026

Debug a Real Codebase, Then an LLM API Round

Phone Screen It was the "party" question that's already been posted on the forum, pretty easy. Debug This round felt a bit harder. The question was the "assign project" one that's already on the forum, and the main issue was that time was tight. It's a new codebase with several files, and you need to go back and forth through it a lot (would've been a lot easier if I could've just used AI for thi…

Onsite0
AppleAccessories Software QA EngineerNew Grad
Mar 2026

A Reorganization Delay and Onsite Rejection

In the first interview, I talked with HR about the role being in San Diego and confirmed that the role would sponsor my OPT. In the second interview, I talked with the hiring manager about my previous QA projects. [I'd done a year as a QA intern and had basically done all the full-time work once already.] Then I was ghosted for three weeks. After that, they called me back and said a reorganizatio…

RejectedOnsite0
AxonSoftware Engineer
Mar 2026

Three Onsite Rounds With a Body Cam Checkout System Design

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OnsiteXP0
RobinhoodSoftware Engineer
Mar 2026

Two Months of Team-Match Limbo, Then a 'Role Moved to Toronto' Excuse

This has been an extremely long timeline, and even now I still don't know whether they want to reject me but can't bring themselves to say it, or whether they're just pretending it's still a team match. If any of you are at Robinhood, please help me figure this out. Thanks! Feb 11 — talked with the recruiter. Feb 19 — first technical round, they said I passed. Then another prep call with the recr…

RejectedOnsite0
DoorDashData Scientist
Mar 2026

System Design for the Home-Page Recommendation Feed

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OnsiteXP0
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
AppleResearch Scientist
Mar 2026

Setting a Retry Threshold to Save iPhone Battery

I recently interviewed for a Research Scientist role at Apple, on a team that works on battery power. Here's the question they asked. The team's core mission is optimizing iPhone battery life and power usage. They found that when users are on Apple Music, they often hit network fluctuations where the app can't get the audio data. At that point the system faces a choice: The disconnect could be a…

RejectedOnsite0
RipplingSoftware Engineer
Mar 2026

An AI-Assisted Coding Round on Poker Hand Comparisons

Continuing from my last post. Round 1 One of the interviewers asked upfront whether I wanted the AI-assisted question or the non-AI one. I picked AI. Question 1 The problem was similar to comparing two poker hands: you're given a bunch of rules for ranking hands, the input is two string arrays, and the output is user1 or user2. I started by stating a few assumptions and clarifications, then analy…

Onsite0
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
PayPalMachine Learning EngineerSenior+
Mar 2026

HR Never Got Interviewer Answers, Wrong Prep, Rejected

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RejectedOnsiteXP0
StripeSoftware Engineer
Mar 2026

Onsite Coding, Integration, and Bug Squash Loop, No Offer

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RejectedOnsiteXP0
Hudson River TradingAlgorithm DeveloperIntern
Mar 2026

Rejected After the Morning Onsite Rounds

I went to the onsite around October or November last year — sharing my experience getting rejected. I'm a US undergrad. I went through one coding OA and two math online interviews before getting to the onsite. The math rounds covered some probability and combinatorics questions — you need a solid grasp of the Central Limit Theorem and basic probability. The onsite has four rounds: programming, da…

RejectedOnsite0
AnthropicSoftware Engineer
Mar 2026

OA, a Python LRU Cache Phone Screen, and Rejection After a Full Onsite

Posting my Anthropic interview from a while back. I felt like I nailed everything. The culture round and the hiring manager round also went okay. In the end I still didn't pass. It feels way too arbitrary. (Maybe my background just wasn't a great match — I was interviewing for a billing platform team, but I've never worked on payments.) OA - recipe manager Phone screen - coding Q2 - LRU cache, th…

RejectedOnsite1
RipplingSoftware Engineer
Mar 2026

How I Used AI-Enabled Coding in the Onsite

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OnsiteXP0
OpenAIMachine Learning Engineer
Mar 2026

A Text Editor That Grew Into Undo/Redo, Autocomplete, and Real-Time Collaboration

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Technical ScreenXP0
MetaSoftware EngineerSenior+
Mar 2026

Strong E6 Onsite, Rejected at Hiring Committee

A while back I interviewed for an E6 INFRA role at Meta. Every single interview felt positive, but I ultimately got cut at the hiring committee round, with no specific feedback. Pretty frustrated, but nothing to do except move on. Phone screens: I got "Er Liu" and "Odd Mutant" — aced both. Onsite coding: "Commander" and "Yao San San" — also aced both, and the follow-up edge cases the interviewer…

RejectedOnsite0
GoogleSoftware EngineerIntern
Mar 2026

All-English First Round, No Behavioral Questions

I'm based in the US, so they set me up with an interviewer for this one, all in English. No behavioral questions, no self-introduction, straight into problems. Given a string input, return true if every subsequence of length ≥ 3 is a valid English word. I used a recursive approach and walked through the time and space complexity. Given a string input, return true if every subsequence of length ≥…

No responseTechnical Screen0
CitadelSoftware Engineer
Mar 2026

2027 OA, Two Problems in 75 Minutes

There were two problems, with 75 minutes in total. First problem: Given an initial work schedule for n days, an employee earns a fixed amount for each working day. If the previous day was also a working day, the employee earns an additional bonus. The employee may change at most k days off into working days, but may not change a working day into a day off. The goal is to choose which days off to…

Online Assessment0
RipplingSoftware EngineerSenior+
Mar 2026

An 11-Minute Late Start, a Chaotic Round, and a Recruiter Swap

The interviewer was 11 minutes late. I was actually about to just leave the call and email the recruiter to say they were a no-show, but they showed up at the very last moment. After joining, there was no intro or behavioral portion at all — they went straight into technical. Right off the bat they asked whether I wanted an AI or non-AI technical round, and I picked non-AI. Then the interviewer j…

RejectedTechnical 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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