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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AmazonSoftware Engineer
Jan 2026

A Sparse Sliding Window Over Infinite Bags

The first online-assessment question was set in Amazon's financial team. An analyst had an infinite line of bags numbered from 1 onward. Information about the money in the bags was given as continuous, nonintersecting segments. Every bag inside a segment held the segment's stated amount, while every bag outside the supplied segments held zero. The goal was to choose exactly k consecutive bags tha…

Online Assessment0
InstacartSoftware EngineerSenior+
Jan 2026

OA, Two Coding Rounds, and a Karat AI Coding Round

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

OnsiteXP0
xAIML/Infra Engineer
Jan 2026

Rejected After a Distributed Matrix Multiplication Coding Round

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RejectedTechnical ScreenXP0
UberSoftware Engineer
Jan 2026

Solved the Dependency Graph Problem, Still Rejected for Not Flagging Edge Cases

I finished the problem and ran a few test cases I wrote myself. A week later I got a "moving forward with other candidates" rejection. I had AI polish up the problem statement a bit: Package Build Order (dependency build order) Problem description (abstract version): The interviewer gave me an interface: — it returns the direct dependencies of a given package. Requirements: given a target package…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
DiscordSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Jan 2026

Cut After One AI-Assisted Chat Server Round

I got a referral to Discord late last year and got rejected right away. This month, ironically, I got picked up through a mass application instead. When I talked to the recruiter he said the package looks pretty big, but the interview bar is high too. I'm honestly not that strong, and at the time I felt like I wasn't at that level, but I gritted my teeth and went anyway. In the end I only made it…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
ShopifySoftware Engineer
Jan 2026

Rejected the Morning After a Rover Pair-Programming Round

After a quick first call with the recruiter, they immediately scheduled a pair programming round plus an assessment. The assessment was done online first, and included 40 IQ questions plus 120 behavioral questions. All 40 questions were pretty simple. The recruiter's email said to find a quiet place and have paper and pen ready, but it turned out to just be simple stuff like spot-the-difference p…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
SnapchatSoftware Engineer
Jan 2026

Five-Round Virtual Onsite, Auto-Rejected With No Reason

Sharing my feedback report for Snap from earlier this year. The virtual onsite had 5 rounds total — two coding, two system design, and one Q&A round where I could ask anything. The Q&A round interviewer told me that if I passed at least 3 of the previous 4 rounds, I'd move on to the discussion stage; with only 2 passes, I'd most likely be rejected. I felt like I did decently, but in the end I got…

RejectedOnsite0
UberSoftware Engineer
Jan 2026

Two Weeks of Recruiter Silence After the Onsite

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No responseOnsiteXP0
CitadelQuantitative Developer
Jan 2026

Four Rounds Then Waitlisted Despite Good Feedback

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RejectedOnsiteXP0
AmazonSoftware EngineerIntern
Jan 2026

A Topological Sort the Interviewer Drew on the Spot

Round 1's interview and timeline are covered in a separate link, so I won't repeat that here. The interviewer described the question verbally: Amazon has a ton of services, and there are dependencies between them. When we take some of those services offline, figure out which other services end up affected. Clarifying questions: always, always do this first — get the conditions of the problem comp…

Onsite0
RipplingSoftware Engineer
Jan 2026

Extensible Five-Card Poker Evaluation

Write a simplified version of Texas Hold'em. Given two five-card hands, compare them and determine the winner. The design needed to use object-oriented principles, pay attention to code style, and be extensible. Game Rules Goal: Compare two five-card hands, hand_1 and hand_2, and determine the winner. Card values: 9 is the highest value and 1 is the lowest. There are no letter cards such as ace,…

Technical Screen0
BytedanceSoftware Engineer
Jan 2026

Merge Intervals, Then Course Schedule

The interviewer was looking over my resume while I gave my self-introduction, and after I finished he asked about a project from my background — a project building a model, and he asked about offline evaluation for the model. Coding: given a set of time-window intervals, merge all overlapping intervals. Input: [[1,3],[2,6],[8,10]], output: [[1,6],[8,10]]. My approach: first sort by each interval'…

Technical Screen0
DropboxSoftware Engineer
Jan 2026

A Hangman Variant and a Recursive Async Job Twist

The OA was a design question — you needed to implement a class that supports some basic operations, similar to a banking system. Next is the onsite, split into two stages total. This post mainly covers the first stage. Behavioral: This round mainly revolved around one of my bigger projects, and we went pretty deep into it. The interviewer was more like digging into specific points to discuss furt…

Onsite0
TeslaBackend EngineerSenior+
Jan 2026

Four Onsite Rounds, All Staff-Level Interviewers

Phone screen, 45 min: design a ticket-master system. We went deep on how to prevent double booking. The interviewer also cared a lot about UX — what the API returns, what seat map the frontend shows once it gets that response, etc. Onsite: each round was 45 min. The email told me who the interviewer was and their title, but not which round would be system design vs. past-experience. It was schedu…

Onsite0
ShopifySoftware EngineerSenior+
Jan 2026

Building a Tiny URL Shortener with AI-Assisted Coding

I interviewed for a Senior SDE role at Shopify. The interviewer was very easy to talk to and things went smoothly. The problem was to write a local tiny URL shortener, similar to a LeetCode-style problem. We discussed the following points together: Input validation: checking whether the input URL is well-formed. Encoding: use an MD5 hash, and we discussed how to handle hash collisions. How to sto…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
C3 AISoftware EngineerNew Grad
Jan 2026

Three Multiple-Choice Questions and Two Coding Problems

Three multiple-choice questions and two coding questions on HackerRank, with no camera required. Multiple-choice questions Time Complexity Hash There are 7 computers in a network (numbered from 0 to 6). Each network request is assigned to one of those computers. Hash function used for that is: H(id) = id % 7 Which computer will have maximum load if the request ids are... A retrieval augmented gen…

Online Assessment0
BytedanceSoftware Engineer
Jan 2026

Passed Round 1, Failed Round 2 After Solving Two of Three Problems

Round 1 was a coding round with the interviewer, and the experience was great. It was conducted in English, one hour total: the first five minutes were quick self-introductions, then 45 minutes of coding, and the last 10 minutes were for me to ask questions. The problem was a LeetCode question — the exact name was obscured in the original post, but it involved some kind of transformation. I walke…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
VerkadaSoftware Engineer
Jan 2026

Phone Screen Plus a Four-Round Onsite, No Feedback After Two Weeks

Phone screening: HR sent an environment setup prep ahead of time, asking me to set up my GitHub account beforehand and install Docker / PyCharm etc. locally. The interviewer was very patient and walked through the whole flow end to end — I needed to implement three API calls. The actual question matched a report I'd already seen in another thread on the forum. Onsite, live and in person: I drove…

No responseOnsite0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Jan 2026

A Friendly BQ Round That Kept Digging Into Conflict and Ownership

The interviewer for this BQ round was very nice and friendly, and took notes the whole time. Overall it didn't feel like an interrogation, more like a logical conversation — they kept circling back around the same competency and probing deeper. Disagree / Conflict First asked: have you ever disagreed with someone. After I gave an example, they followed up asking how I generally deal with conflict…

HR Screen0
BytedanceSite Reliability Engineer
Jan 2026

Rejected After a Deep-Dive Linux Round

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RejectedTechnical ScreenXP0

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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