Interview Experiences

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

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4437 stories

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LinkedInSoftware EngineerSenior+
Oct 2025

Five-Round Virtual Onsite Undone by a System Design Question

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RejectedOnsiteXP0
OracleSoftware Engineer
Oct 2025

Same Question Rewritten Three Times in One Phone Screen

Documenting a bad phone interview experience. I don't know if this is typical for OCI, but here's my advice: if you can tell early on you're going to have a hard time communicating with the interviewer, just reschedule. The interviewer was some old guy, and his accent was incredibly, incredibly heavy. That said, there's nothing to be done about that in general — my own team has several people wit…

Technical Screen0
MetaSoftware Engineer
Oct 2025

Onsite Loop Sunk by a System Design Round

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RejectedOnsiteXP0
DoorDashAnalytics Engineer
Oct 2025

Rejected After a Four-Round Virtual Onsite

I couldn't find a single interview review for the analytics engineering role on the forum, so I'm contributing one. Tech round: one LC medium question, not sure if it's an original/repeat question, pretty simple but exhausting — window sum, find the max sum. I'd seen it before in DoorDash's DE interview reviews. Then four SQL questions — he said getting three done was actually fine. I wrote the f…

RejectedOnsite0
InstacartData ScientistSenior+
Oct 2025

Four Onsite Rounds Including a Bar Raiser Case

Four rounds. Round 1 — Problem Solving (30 mins): partnered with a local grocery store to add a smart cart that lets users find that store's own products and prices on the smart cart, and at the same time see products and prices from other stores on the Instacart app through the same cart. Asked whether this is a good idea, what the hypothesis would be, which metrics to look at, and how to design…

Onsite0
BloombergSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Oct 2025

Rejected After a Van Eck Sequence Question

Painful memory from an interview I did last year, around September-October. I was in a funk for a month after it. Bloomberg's bar is basically two medium-to-hard questions, and you're expected to get the optimal solution. It was a virtual interview, and the interviewer showed up 10 minutes late. I sat in the meeting watching her keep logging in and out, and when she finally turned her camera on,…

RejectedOnsite0
CitadelData Scientist
Oct 2025

Cold Applied, Wildcard Matching Live Coding, Rejected Next Day

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RejectedTechnical ScreenXP0
DRWSoftware EngineerIntern
Oct 2025

A 3-Problem Codility OA With a 5-Part Robot Pathfinding Puzzle

I applied to DRW Singapore for the SWE C++ Internship. The first round was a Codility OA, 150 minutes for 3 problems. There are n people, each with a distinct ability value in [1, n]. You're given a[i], the ability value of the i-th person. n is guaranteed to be a power of 2, with n <= 200,000. Then several rounds of a tournament are held. In each round, players are paired off left to right (#1 v…

In progressOnline Assessment0
OneMain FinancialData ScientistNew Grad
Oct 2025

A Case on Ditching Traditional Branches for Digital

Had my interview today, so let me do a recap while it's still fresh. I got a VP who spent 15 years at Capital One before jumping to this company. He came in like a machine gun from the start — honestly it's a waste he's not a rapper. He jumped straight into a case: OneMain's credit card business has two flows — a traditional branch business and a digital business. Q1 was why OneMain would want to…

Technical Screen0
StripeSoftware Engineer
Oct 2025

Five-Round Onsite, Rejected After Reference Checks

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RejectedOnsiteXP0
BloombergSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Oct 2025

A GHC Resume Pickup Ends in a Failed First Virtual Onsite

Application timeline: 9/26/2025: Found a referral and applied for the 2026 Software Engineer - New York role. The position isn't open to the public — you can only apply through a referral. 11/2025: Went to GHC'25, talked to a Bloomberg engineer, dropped off a paper resume, and saw them mark it up. 11/13/2025: Unexpectedly got the schedule-VO (virtual onsite) email — must have been picked up throu…

RejectedOnsite0
LyftSoftware EngineerIntern
Oct 2025

Three Rounds, Rejected for No Headcount After Three Months

The OA had two parts. The first was responding to a PM's comments inside a doc, and the second was coding — more like they hand you a stripped-down existing project and have you edit the code according to review comments, not your typical LeetCode problem. VO1: one hour of coding, something like LRU. I basically finished within 30 minutes. The interviewer was really nice, and there weren't many f…

RejectedOnsite0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Oct 2025

A Sliding Window Question I Couldn't Crack

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Technical ScreenXP0
CrowdstrikeSoftware Engineer, CloudSenior+
Oct 2025

A String-Templating Coding Round, Then a Rejection

Sharing a fresh rejection story. I don't have a cybersecurity background. I applied for a senior SWE, cloud role. The position requires being based in the US Eastern time zone, since it involves working with the team in Europe. First was an HR screen, with some basic questions — whether I knew Go, what the most complex project I'd worked on was, that kind of thing. At the time I thought I had no…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
CloudflareSoftware Engineer
Oct 2025

HM Chat, HR Screen, Then a Key-Value Store Round Where AI Wrote My Crypto

The HM round was basically both sides chatting about background. The HM gave a lot of intro about the team — the team mainly uses Go. HR screen, about two weeks later. They walked me through the interview process and collected some info about my relevant experience, but it was mostly them introducing the interview and what the team does. Scheduled for about a week after that. I could use search,…

No responseTechnical Screen0
AristaSoftware Engineer
Oct 2025

One-and-Done After a C/C++ Screen

Arista — one round and done, Vancouver, network systems team. A lot of new openings got posted toward the end of the year — maybe they'd just opened up a new team? The one round was a VO, purely technical. After a five-minute self-introduction they went straight into problems. They used CoderPad, and most of the questions had already shown up on the forum. Questions and discussion They asked abou…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
RobloxData ScientistIntern
Oct 2025

An OA With Robot-Building and Factory Profit Puzzles

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Online AssessmentXP0
MetaSoftware EngineerSenior+
Oct 2025

Phone Screen Plus a Five-Round VO

I interviewed at Meta at the end of last year. Reading other people's interview reports on this forum helped me a lot, so I'm sharing mine to give back. Phone screen: the first part was the usual behavioral questions, and the second part was two LeetCode problems tagged Easy on Meta's list. VO (virtual onsite): 2 rounds of coding, 2 rounds of system design, and 1 round of BQ. The coding and syste…

Onsite0
BrexSoftware Engineer
Reported Oct 2025

Brex Software Engineer interview: recruiter call under 15 minutes

I applied and quickly received an invitation for a screening call, so the timeline moved fast. The process ended with a rejection shortly afterward, although the screening itself was fairly standard. The recruiter call lasted under 15 minutes. We went through the usual prompts: telling me about myself, describing a project or complex feature I had worked on, and explaining how I approached it. Th…

Rejected0
ConfluentSolutions Engineer
Reported Oct 2025

Confluent Solutions Engineer interview: cloud and data management focus

My biggest issue started before the technical work. The role requirements felt misrepresented. I spent time with the recruiter and hiring manager discussing my background in detail, and they explicitly told me that specialized knowledge of their products or data streaming wasn't required. When the one-hour technical interview came, the focus didn't match what I had been led to expect. The convers…

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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