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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MetaData Scientist
Jan 2026

SQL and Product Questions Built Around Ads Pixel

I interviewed at Meta last Friday, and Monday evening I got an email from the recruiter saying I passed — coming back to report on this. Both the SQL and the product question were built around ads pixel, which I'd almost never seen in previous interview writeups before. There were two SQL questions total, both pretty simple. The first was a simple aggregation. The second asked about the relations…

In progressTechnical Screen0
MicrosoftSoftware Engineer
Jan 2026

Sharding Embeddings and Language-Model Outputs

The author describes a Microsoft AI infrastructure virtual-onsite discussion centered on distributing large embedding tables and language-model output layers across GPUs. The interview compared splitting by vocabulary entries with splitting by hidden dimensions, asking how each choice affects memory use, communication, and connections to later computation. Follow-ups examined routing token lookup…

Onsite0
Anthropic
Jan 2026

Forced Into Single-Threaded Code, Then Rejected

I recently did a phone screen with Anthropic. I actually had a lot of goodwill toward this company going in, but the interview experience was extremely bad — I felt like the interviewer led me straight into a trap. Writing this to recap what happened, and also to ask everyone here for advice: when you run into an unprofessional interviewer during an interview, how do you save yourself? And is the…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
LinkedInData Scientist
Jan 2026

Product Sense, SQL, and a Rushed Pandas GROUP BY

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Technical ScreenXP0
GofundmeSoftware Engineer
Jan 2026

Valid Parentheses Question and a React/Firebase Deep Dive

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Technical ScreenXP0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Jan 2026

Strong Feedback Every Round, Still Rejected

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RejectedOnsiteXP0
AirbnbSoftware Engineer
Jan 2026

Passed Onsite and Core Value, Now Waiting on Team Match

I got laid off in the middle of last year, unfortunately. After that, looking at my mortgage, I felt empty and pessimistic for a while, then started grinding practice problems hard. At first I used a bunch of small companies to warm up, but I was rusty and kept getting rejected all over the place — I was almost losing my confidence. Then I finally got an interview at Airbnb through a referral. Ai…

In progressOther0
DoorDashSoftware Engineer
Jan 2026

Referral, Fast Loop, and a Painfully Slow Immigration Law Firm

Backfilling my full February DoorDash interview. It was a friend's referral. The process moved really fast, probably because my previous team and this team were a very close match in terms of business. The guidance said the coding round would be "coding with AI", but in the actual interview there was no AI assistance and no AI round, and the interviewers said they had never heard that AI was allo…

OfferOnsite0
UberData Scientist
Jan 2026

A Move-Zeros Coding Problem and an ETA Business Case Study

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Technical ScreenXP0
MetaSoftware Engineer
Jan 2026

E5 Onsite With a Surprise AI-Assisted Round

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OnsiteXP0
NatooraData Analyst
Jan 2026

No Pricing Background, Deep Grilling on ETL and LLM Resume Projects

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Technical ScreenXP0
TikTokSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Jan 2026

Round 2 Was BQ Plus a DP Video-Scheduling Problem

Round 1 went pretty smoothly, and they told me about round 2 the next day — this round also wrapped up well. After a self-introduction, the interviewer moved into behavioral questions, mostly digging into my resume: briefly describe your internship project, what you learned from it, what was the most challenging project, how communication worked within the project team, what role you played, and…

In progressTechnical Screen0
Stripe
Jan 2026

Technical Screen, Three Repeat Coding Questions

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In progressTechnical ScreenXP0
IBMData ScientistIntern
Jan 2026

Marketing Lead-Scoring Case, Offer in Two Weeks

After I submitted my application, I automatically got sent an OA — one Python question and one SQL question, not too hard. First round (mainly asked about my resume, a deep dive into the ML project on my resume, and a case): What's your experience building a statistical model and a machine learning model? What kinds of variables/features did you use? Did the client only care about the results, or…

OfferTechnical Screen0
BytedanceData Scientist
Jan 2026

Three Onsite Rounds on Multimodal Deployment and Dropout

Round 1 Discussed how to deploy a multimodal model when compute and GPU memory are limited. Follow-up: given existing captions and embeddings, how to speed up video retrieval. Asked what overfitting is and how to mitigate it. Coding question: implement a MinStack that returns the minimum in O(1) time. Round 2 Discussed methods to mitigate overfitting in deep learning and how Dropout works. Compar…

Onsite0
LinkedInData Scientist
Jan 2026

Product Sense, SQL, and a Pandas Group-By Slip

Interviewers: the main interviewer and a shadow interviewer, both very friendly. Question 1: Product Sense — how would you analyze a drop in traffic from the Home Page to the Profile Page? (20 mins) My approach: Start with a qualitative check: open LinkedIn's homepage myself to see if there's an obvious change or bug. For example, there was a recent user report that searching for someone's name s…

Technical Screen0
The New York TimesData Analyst
Jan 2026

Five Rounds, Three References, Then Rejected

It's been four years since this interview, but on top of wishing everyone a happy new year, I wanted to share roughly what the interview process at this company was like. I went through five rounds of interviews with this company in total — the process was pretty drawn out. At the end they also wanted three references (a peer, my direct manager, and a manager I had collaborated with). After going…

RejectedOnsite0
RobloxData ScientistIntern
Jan 2026

Nailed a DID Case Study, Still Got Cut After Round 1

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RejectedTechnical ScreenXP0
WhatnotMachine Learning Engineer
Jan 2026

A Weird Product Sense Round, Then Silence

The recruiter reached out before the new year, but it got pushed to after the new year before interviews actually started. Whatnot is a livestream sales platform. The recruiter screen was simple, just chatting about my background and interests. They quickly scheduled the HM interview. The HM interview was half an hour, also mostly chatting about background and interests, but they did ask what imp…

RejectedOnsite0
ShopifyData Scientist
Jan 2026

SQL-Only Screen with a Passive Interviewer

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In progressTechnical 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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