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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BloombergSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Feb 2026

Four Rounds, an EM No-Show, and a Fast Offer

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OfferOnsiteXP0
SnapchatMachine Learning Engineer
Feb 2026

Four Onsite Rounds, Still Waiting to Hear Back

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In progressOnsiteXP0
RobinhoodSoftware Engineer
Feb 2026

CoderPad Print Bug Derails a Topo Sort Phone Screen

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RejectedTechnical ScreenXP0
RubrikFrontend EngineerIntern
Feb 2026

90-Minute OA, Solved Just One of Three Problems

90 minutes, 3 problems. Felt like every problem was medium+ difficulty. I only managed to solve the first one, and even that had a TLE. LeetCode 2551 Given two vectors of equal length, for each index [i] there is guaranteed to be an edge between v1[i] and v2[i]. Within the same vector, earlier elements sit at a higher level and later elements sit at a lower level, and together they end up forming…

Online Assessment0
MetaMachine Learning Engineer
Feb 2026

Two Coding Rounds, Strong System Design, Rejected Anyway

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RejectedOnsiteXP0
MetaSoftware Engineer
Feb 2026

A New AI Project Round, Then a Maze Coding Fail

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RejectedOnsiteXP0
Metropolis
Feb 2026

Rejected After an HM Screen Filled In by a Senior Staff Engineer

A recruiter from a startup reached out to me on LinkedIn. I figured I'd learn a bit more about it, so I decided to take the interview. The first round was an HM screen, done by a senior staff engineer. He said the team hadn't hired a manager yet, so he was standing in for that role. It was mostly about my projects and behavioral questions. Maybe we just didn't click, because I didn't pass. Here's…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
GoogleSoftware EngineerIntern
Feb 2026

Picked Google Over Databricks, Waymo, and TikTok Offers

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OfferTechnical ScreenXP0
InterSystemsSoftware Engineer
Feb 2026

Full CDP Loop, Three Rounds, Redirected to QDP

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RejectedOnsiteXP0
TikTokSoftware Engineer in TestIntern
Feb 2026

Two Rounds, a Distracted Interviewer, and a Reject

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RejectedTechnical ScreenXP0
StripeSoftware Engineer
Feb 2026

Five Rounds, Rejected on a Surprise System Design Question

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RejectedOnsiteXP0
MicrosoftSoftware Engineer
Feb 2026

Four Onsite Rounds, Failed on an Unfamiliar Coding Problem

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RejectedOnsiteXP0
OpenAIEngineering ManagerSenior+
Feb 2026

A Slack System-Design Screen That Fell Apart on Scalability

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RejectedTechnical ScreenXP0
SnowflakeSoftware Engineer
Feb 2026

Two Coding Phone Screens and a Quick Rejection

Both rounds of my coding phone screens were with interviewers from the company's tagged LeetCode question set. I'd recommend grinding more LeetCode before you go in. The first round was LC 210 style — directed graph topological sort. Not much to say about the problem itself, except I had to write my own test cases. The interviewer for this round didn't seem to be feeling well — she was coughing a…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
TikTokMachine Learning EngineerNew Grad
Feb 2026

Three Technical Rounds, Pulled From the Pool

(Project questions omitted) Round 1: Our current business needs a multimodal large model to caption videos — how do you ensure deployment stays within compute and memory constraints? Follow-up: if you already have captions and embeddings, and a brand advertiser wants to quickly find relevant videos to watermark, how would you speed that up? What is overfitting, and how do you mitigate it? Coding:…

Technical Screen0
TuroSoftware Engineer
Feb 2026

Four Onsite Rounds, Verbal Offer in Under a Month

Background I got a referral, and as soon as the role opened they scheduled a call directly. (My personal takeaway: right now applying early matters more than being strong.) Timeline: 01/13 Applied 01/15 Recruiter call 01/15 OA 01/28-01/29 Four rounds of virtual onsite 02/06 Verbal offer Interview Experience Recruiter call Simple questions about my background, how long I've been working, what this…

OfferOnsite0
AmazonSoftware Engineer
Feb 2026

A Heap-Based Rental Revenue Problem and a String Block-Partition Problem

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Technical ScreenXP0
AirtableSoftware Engineer
Feb 2026

Weak BQ, a Dispatcher Coding Round, and a Fast Rejection

Onsite. The rest of the loop covered questions that have already been discussed elsewhere, so I won't go over them again in detail. The behavioral question round was the usual boilerplate. I hadn't prepared for it, and I also didn't click with the hiring manager, so I answered pretty badly — I'm guessing this is where I get rejected. One of their signature questions: they push an inclusive cultur…

RejectedOnsite0
TeslaMachine Learning Engineer
Feb 2026

Rejected After Two Technical Rounds

The first round was with the interviewer. He gave a quick rundown of his background, then asked how to model other agents in the simulation. The coding part was based on an input of shape [batch, num_waypoint, 2], and I had to compute a suffix sum, with output shape [batch, num_waypoint]. I forget the exact follow-up question after that... let me think about it more. The second round was with the…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
MetaMachine Learning EngineerSenior+
Feb 2026

Full Onsite Recap, Then Layoffs Hit Right After

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OnsiteXP0

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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