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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AdobeSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Scala Trivia, Then a Surprise LeetCode Classic

This is one of the many applications I scattered around blindly. I applied to GenStudio on the DX team (people on the forum say DX is a "poison team," same as AEP?). When I applied, it happened to line up with Adobe's legendary summer break, so by the time HR came back from vacation and finally reached out to me, I'd already piled up several rejection letters from other places, hah, wry laugh. Th…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
ShopifySoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Personality-Test OA, Then a Culture-Heavy HR Screen

I found someone on LinkedIn to refer me to Shopify. Given how the job market is right now, if you can get a referral, just take it. The day after the referral I got an email for an HR interview. The OA was a personality test plus some basic math questions and spot-the-difference puzzles, using the Criteria CCAT question bank. 40 questions in 40 minutes. Not hard, felt more like an IQ test than co…

In progressHR Screen0
SnowflakeSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Log Binary Search With Two Graph Follow-ups

A classic problem in applied-problem form. Binary Search The input is a log history. There are three types of logs: Info, Warn, and Error, and each log line starts with its own type — for example an Info log looks like "[Info] ...". The log history follows two patterns: Once an Error shows up, the service goes down, and every log after that is Error The log right before the first Error is always…

Technical Screen0
TikTokData Engineer
Sep 2025

Recruiter Chaos and a Final Round That Ended Before I Wrote Any SQL

I interviewed with a team under USDS for a data engineer role. The questions were really weak, so I'm mainly going to focus on the whole process instead. Right now I've just finished one HR round plus three Zoom call rounds. First, I had a friend at TikTok (not on the USDS team) refer me for a bunch of positions, but I only got one rejection back — never heard anything about the rest. Then, almos…

In progressTechnical Screen0
AmazonSoftware EngineerSenior+
Sep 2025

Five-Round L6 Onsite, No Breaks, One Rough HM

Just finished interviewing this week. Not a great experience. The whole process was rocky — I got switched between teams for matching several times, and there were two months between the phone screen and the onsite. Security & Service org. It felt like they wanted to go through the motions without actually wanting to hire me. The third round with the HM in particular was a really bad experience,…

RejectedOnsite0
NVIDIATechnical Marketing Engineer
Sep 2025

One Round, Four Parts: Resume, ML Trivia, and Live NumPy Coding

Technical Marketing Engineer - NVIDIA AI. NVIDIA has five rounds total, two with coding and three without coding. My interviewer was a data scientist. She asked me how many coding rounds I'd already had, and I said only one, so she said okay, then this round has to include coding, we can't just do a pure Q&A chat. Here's the whole flow, four parts: resume, technical fundamentals, coding, and ques…

Technical Screen0
Applied IntuitionSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Recursion Blocked in Favor of a Stack

The question was a new one I hadn't seen before — roughly, implement an in-memory key-value store that supports transactions. Your system needs to process a series of commands that assign values to variables, print variable values, and manage transactional blocks. The tricky part is that you can assign to a variable that was already assigned before entering the transaction. My first instinct was…

Technical Screen0
WeRideSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Sep 2025

Expression-to-Sum-of-Products Problem

WeRide New Grad SDE first-round technical screening, entirely on HackerRank, including video. The interviewer was 4 minutes late. We first talked about my resume for about 15 minutes — they asked how what I did during my PhD connects to an SDE role. Then we moved on to the problem, conducted entirely in Chinese. The question was as follows: Given an expression made up only of lowercase English le…

Technical Screen0
ShopifyMachine Learning Engineer
Sep 2025

OA Puzzles Then a One-Hour Life Story Interview

After submitting my resume on the official website, I quickly got a reply from HR. They scheduled a life story interview, but before that I needed to do an OA. The OA has two parts. The first part is about 20-25 minutes, with 40 questions total — spot-the-difference across images, number sequences where you find the pattern, addition and multiplication calculations, that kind of thing. You're all…

In progressHR Screen0
TikTokMachine Learning Engineer
Sep 2025

Great First Two Rounds, Then a Hostile HM Round and a Ghosting

Quick summary: Round 1: LeetCode 300 + resume questions. Round 2: LeetCode 403 + resume questions. Round 3: resume only. TL;DR: all high-frequency questions, grind them, and talk through your resume well. If you don't want to read the rant, feel free to skip out now — what follows is my personal venting, and I need to get it off my chest. The first two rounds felt like they were with people actua…

No responseOnsite0
AmazonSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Two Online Assessment Questions on Calorie-Maximizing Jumps and Password Similarity

Question 1: Problem description: A user is doing jump exercises using an Amazon fitness tracker. There are n blocks of different heights (height[i] is the height of the i-th block). The user starts from the ground (height 0) and must jump to every block exactly once, with the goal of maximizing calories burned. The calories burned jumping from block i to block j are calculated as (height[i] - hei…

Online Assessment0
StripeSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

A Three-Part Payment/Invoice Matching Problem

Payment and invoice, split into three parts. Invoice is always a list, something like ["invoice-id-1, 100, 2022-01-01", "invoice-id-2, 300, 2022-01-01"]. Payment is just one, something like 'payment-id, 300, paying for: invoice-id-1'. In part one, the payment includes an invoice id, and you're asked to output: "payment-id paid XXX amount for invoice XXX on date XXX" In part two, the payment no lo…

Technical Screen0
SamsungMachine Learning Engineer
Sep 2025

Panicked on a String Palindrome and Failed the Screen

I'm new to industry and to LeetCode, not a CS major, and I recently gave up on academia to try to switch into industry. I got lucky and landed a first-round interview with Samsung, one hour, with a senior staff interviewer. The whole thing was scheduled in a rush — the confirmation email with the interview link only went out the day before, and it wasn't until I saw the coding link that I realize…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
TeslaSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

No Extra Memory Allowed

I'm finally getting around to keeping a promise — sharing my phone screen experience for Tesla Dojo. The coding difficulty was medium-to-hard, but the bar for detail was very high. Hope this is useful for anyone else interviewing for Dojo. The interviewer showed up a little late, and jumped straight into coding with barely any small talk. Tesla's efficiency is really something. You're given a lis…

Technical Screen0
StripeSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

A Month of No-Shows Before a Tight Three-Part Python Screen

Timeline: Early July, first round was an HR phone call — the interviewer showed up a few minutes late. Mostly asked about location, discussed salary and compensation, my previous work experience, why I chose Stripe. (Though she did mention Stripe supports fully remote, which was a nice touch.) After that we agreed to schedule the technical phone screen, but then they sent the wrong email template…

In progressTechnical Screen0
DoorDashSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Four Onsite Rounds, Same Image Carousel Coding Problem

The onsite question had already been posted before — it's the same old image carousel problem. Four rounds onsite: Coding, 75 min: still the same old question — continuing to build comment and upvote features on top of the carousel. HM behavioral, 45 min: asked some standard behavioral questions, I talked about a project conflict / mistake, and they asked one that doesn't come up often — how do y…

Onsite0
CoupangSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Live-Coded LeetCode 934, Debugged a Stack Overflow Myself

Problem LeetCode 934, Shortest Bridge When I answered, I first laid out all his examples in a structured way below, then started with the function just returning 0. Running it gave n zeros, and I told him this was the first iteration. The next step was to finish the function so it returns the correct result. While working through it, I ran into a case where the recursion wasn't controlled properl…

Technical Screen0
SnowflakeSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

A Trie Backtracking Bug I Never Fixed

First round: the interviewer — I really feel bad, she kept trying to help me the whole time, but in the end I still didn't get the bug fixed within the hour. The input is a string array: [California, California/San Francisco, California/San Francisco/7th Street], etc. The other input is an array of the nodes to delete, e.g. [California/San Francisco], and the return should be [California]. LeetCo…

Technical Screen0
AppleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Two Phone Screens, Failed on the Socket Message Round

Two rounds of phone interviews, done on two separate days. The first half of Apple's phone screens is always a behavioral question, which I thought was pretty distinctive. The first round was with an older engineer, kind of serious and not big on smiling, but you could tell he was a senior engineer. The question was to design a hit counter that aggregates how many hits happened in the past 5 minu…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
Capital OneSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Four OA Problems Under a Tight Clock

The first problem was to figure out how many numbers in an array are a power of some number k. Basically you check whether repeatedly dividing by k eventually gets you to 1, but you have to watch out for the special case where k=1. The second problem was about a planet's lunar calendar: given the moon phase at the start of the year, compute the moon phase on a given date. The phases cycle every 8…

Online Assessment0

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.

Share your experience to earn XP