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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EthosSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Online Assessment on Recoverable Elements from Range-Sum Queries

Recoverable Elements from Range-Sum Queries You are given an unknown integer array A of length N, with elements indexed from 1 to N. You will receive Q range-sum queries. Each query contains two integers L and R, and gives you the sum of all elements of A from index L to index R. Your task is to use the given query information to find all the elements A[i] whose exact value can be uniquely determ…

Online Assessment0
BrexSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Splendor Card Purchase Simulation with a Concurrency Follow-up

Implement a card simulation system similar to the board game Splendor. A player holds gems in five colors: Blue (B), White (W), Green (G), Red (R), Yellow (Y). Each card has a gem cost to purchase it, and the card itself has a color. The data model and code structure are up to you. There are three tasks to implement: Implement a can_purchase(card, player_gems) function. Given a card and the playe…

Technical Screen0
C3 AIData Scientist
Aug 2026

Broad Topics, Fast Answers, and a Rejection

Problem Solving How would you predict the amount of food to keep in storage? This was a fairly basic data science case. ML / Algorithms Bias-variance tradeoff Curse of dimensionality Bagging versus boosting PCA Autoencoders Gradient descent How to keep gradient descent from getting stuck in a local minimum How to evaluate RAG Transformers versus RNNs How to calculate the complexity of attention s…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
Virtu FinancialQuantitative Researcher
Aug 2026

Rejected Before the Final Data Analytics Coding Round

First, there was a 35-minute logic test. The content was very simple, just some pattern recognition and things like that. After that, the difficulty went up. After asking a few questions about my resume, the first interviewer gave me a graph theory brainteaser: Let there be a polygon with n vertices. What is the maximum number of edges you can draw between them without making a triangle (three ve…

RejectedOnsite0
NetflixSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Two Back-to-Back Coding Rounds and a No-Feedback Rejection

The questions were different from every interview report I had seen. There were two back-to-back interviews. First phone round — problem solving: Question: The ping times between cities are different. Starting from one city, find the fastest paths for broadcasting to every other city. Solution: Dijkstra's algorithm. Follow-up: If the ping times keep changing, how should the paths be updated? Solu…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
StripeSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Three Parts of a KYC Validation Problem

KYC, but verifying things like the company name, URL, abbreviation, and description. The first part was to check whether there was a business name. Skip entries without one. For entries with a name, check whether the remaining columns all have values. If they do, it's verified; otherwise, not verified. The output is verified/not verified and the name, one line at a time in input order. The second…

Technical Screen0
TikTokSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Three Weekly USDS Rounds Ending in Rejection

The rounds were basically scheduled one per week. 1st round, coding: Use round-robin scheduling to process tasks. Each task has a task_id, seller_id, tier (VIP or STANDARD), and priority (1 is high and 3 is low). Within one seller's backlog, tasks with smaller priority numbers must be processed first. Tasks with the same priority follow their arrival order, using FIFO. Across sellers, use weighte…

RejectedOnsite0
AddeparSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Ticketmaster Reservations Across Regions and Planets

Addepar Interview - System Design Question: Design Ticketmaster. Functional requirements: Users should be able to view events. Users should be able to search for events. Users should be able to book tickets to events. The same event has multiple sections at the same venue, and different sections have different prices. Checkout has a 10-minute time limit. After the time expires, the ticket must be…

Technical Screen0
Capital OneData Scientist
Aug 2026

Four CodeSignal Tasks and No Reply After Nearly Two Weeks

It has been almost two weeks since I finished, and I have not heard anything, so I probably failed... This was the first interview of my job search, and I never expected to fall at the OA. Looking back, I did not take it seriously enough, did not prepare enough, and was not familiar with this OA format. There are many interview reports on the forum, so I am writing about a few things I had not se…

No responseOnline Assessment0
InstacartAI Analytics Lead II
Aug 2026

An API Data-Ingestion Gap Ended the Process

There was no interview experience for this role on the forum, so I am sharing mine. From the job description, this role looks like an analytics engineer plus a product analyst. With the impact of AI, one person really can do all of this work. Process: After a friend referred me, the recruiter reached out. Online assessment: six or seven SQL questions, not hard. I passed. HM interview: the HM seem…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
AnthropicSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

AI Safety Questions Before a Phone-Interview Invitation

After applying to more than a dozen roles, HR finally contacted me. They asked a lot of questions about AI safety and security. How is Anthropic different from other AI labs? What does AI safety mean to you? What will happen if AI is not properly used? Have you followed Anthropic's recent moves? What did we do right or wrong? Why do you want to work at Anthropic? What do you think are the biggest…

In progressHR Screen0
SnapchatSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Two Bugs, No Time, and a Rejection

The phone-screen question was LeetCode 947. I implemented it using breadth-first search. Near the end, my code still had two bugs. I found one of them myself, while the interviewer pointed out the other one. After that, I ran the test cases. By the time the tests were finished, there was no time left in the interview. I do not know whether the interviewer had prepared a follow-up question, becaus…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
LinkedInSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Two Optimal Solutions in a 60-Minute Screen

The technical phone screen lasted 60 minutes. There were two interviewers, and both were relaxed and friendly. One was shadowing, while the other led the interview. After a brief introduction, the lead interviewer asked about a project on my resume and went straight into its details. The two coding questions were LeetCode 179, Largest Number, and LeetCode 244, Shortest Word Distance II. For both…

Technical Screen0
eBaySoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

An Onsite With No LeetCode

This was the most unusual interview I have had so far. There was not a single LeetCode question in the onsite. First round I wrote a shopping cart. There was not much algorithm work, and it felt as though the round was testing how I communicated with the interviewer. Second round I was asked basic questions about data structures and complexity, including very basic topics such as lists, hashes, a…

Onsite0
EYTechnology Consultant
Aug 2026

A 30-Minute HR Screen Driven by Follow-up Questions

I had a referral, and three days after the referral I received an HR phone-screen invitation. I scheduled the call for the next day. The HR interviewer was very experienced. They did not ask me to introduce myself and instead moved directly from small talk into questions about my previous experience. They asked follow-up questions based on our conversation, and we spoke for about 30 minutes. The…

HR Screen0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Delayed Feedback in a Binary Search Problem

This was my OpenAI rejection experience. Both the coding and system design questions may have been new, because I had never seen either one before. The coding problem had two parts, and both seemed related to binary search. In the first part, I had to implement binary search to guess a secret number. There was a function that reported whether my guess was too low or too high, but its response was…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
ByteDanceSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Aug 2026

Graph Coding Then a Ticket Booking System Design

Round 1: Coding The first round was coding. The problems were mainly graph / topological sort related. Overall the difficulty was not especially high; if you prepare graph, BFS/DFS and topological sort normally, you should be able to cover it. Round 2: System Design The second round was system design, and the question was to design a ticket booking system (a system for grabbing tickets the moment…

In progressTechnical Screen0
CitadelSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Optimizing a Correct C++ Function to Run Under 100 Microseconds

The assessment provided C++ source code for a root_node function. Its logic was correct, but it ran extremely slowly. The task was to refactor and optimize it so that it would finish in strictly less than 100 microseconds on large inputs. The original code contained nested loops and operations such as std::find_if and std::advance, producing O(N²) complexity. I needed to reduce that to O(N). It a…

Online Assessment0
RipplingSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

An AI Coding Edge Case with Filtered Parent Tasks

This AI coding phone screen ended in rejection. Sending the problem directly to an AI could miss an important edge case: if a parent is filtered out, its child task should be filtered out as well. One test case for that behavior was: The fourth task was unrelated and should remain in the result, while the parent and grandchild should not appear because the grandparent was filtered.

RejectedTechnical Screen0
DatadogSoftware EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

Reviewing an AI-Assisted Batching PR

In the code review round, I was given a pull request for an issue where a Python application was crashing under heavy load. The pull request changed the existing synchronous processor, which handled one request at a time, into a batched processor that handled 40 requests at a time. The repository still included the synchronous processor as a reference. However, if creation of the batched processo…

Onsite0

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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