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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SIG (Susquehanna)Data Scientist
Aug 2026

Seventeen Quantitative and Logic Questions

The online assessment contained 17 questions. Question 1 You walk into a barn and see ants, cows, and chickens. There are 570 legs in total. The number of ants is twice the number of chickens, and the number of cows is twice the number of ants. Compute the number of ants. Question 2 You are on an island inhabited by knights, who always tell the truth, and knaves, who always lie. Perlica and Chen…

Online Assessment0
BCGForward Deploy EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

An Unweighted Graph Turned Weighted

A friend referred me for a Senior Forward Deploy Engineer role. The interviewer was very nice. The first 30 minutes were a deep dive into my projects, with many questions related to AI. The last 30 minutes were a live coding problem: find the shortest path in an unweighted graph represented by an adjacency matrix. Given the adjacency matrix of a connected, undirected graph with no loops or multip…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Three-Part Hiring Assessment on Work Style and Ethics

These are the latest Google Hiring Assessment questions I had just finished. They were all questions I actually received. This time I took the new version of the Google Hiring Assessment. There was no coding, and it mainly had three parts. Part One: Most Like Me / Least Like Me Each question gave three statements. First I chose the one most like me, and then I chose the one least like me from the…

Online Assessment0
SquarepointRisk Technology Software EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

A Three-Month Process Ending in Rejection

I am an older programmer. After graduating in 2016, I spent my early career doing C++ backend development at internet companies. After the pandemic, I moved into quantitative development. My most recent job was developing trading infrastructure in the Singapore office of a small quantitative firm, and my former employer laid me off in March. From March through May, I interviewed intensively with…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

GPU Credits and a Photo Storage System

This was my OpenAI software engineer technical screen, adding a recent data point. The coding problem was GPU Credit. I had seen a similar question before, so I finished it almost immediately. The task was roughly to implement a GPU-credit or resource-credit system that supported: Granting a quantity of credits with activation and expiration times. Subtracting or consuming credits at a particular…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
Fora TravelSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Coding, System Design, and API Design in One Technical Screen

Coding The question was pretty simple: Q: Given two unsorted integer arrays a and b, where a has enough placeholder positions at the end to hold all elements of b, merge b into a and sort the final array in ascending order. Example: Additional constraints: Both a and b are unsorted a has enough placeholder positions at the end to hold b The final result needs to be placed in a There was no explic…

Technical Screen0
Hudson River TradingSite Reliability Engineer
Aug 2026

Rejected After Answering Every Question

Role: Site Reliability Engineer I had found a really useful interview report on the forum before mine, and the overlap with what I actually got asked was pretty high. This is also my own area of work, so going into the interview I felt like I had a 100% chance of passing, but I still failed. I'm not really sure why. Let me write up roughly what was asked — honestly you can just ask AI what kinds…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
UberSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Four Onsite Rounds, All About the Follow-Ups

Four rounds, questions weren't hard but the pace was really fast Let me lead with the conclusion: Uber's problems really aren't hard, but they move fast. 45 minutes a round, and the interviewer practically wants you to knock out the main problem in 15 minutes so there's a full half hour left for piling on requirements. It felt less like solving problems and more like sitting in a requirements rev…

Onsite0
LinkedInSoftware EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

Failed the System Design Round, One-Year Cooldown

Coding: LeetCode "Deadpool" and 272. SD: Post Search. The deep dive mostly focused on how to quickly figure out which posts contain a keyword, how to implement excluding a keyword (for example, a post must contain apple but must not contain banana), and how to rank the returned post results by keyword frequency. AI Coding: a roller coaster passenger-seating problem. You are given how many seats a…

RejectedOnsite0
C3 AIData Scientist
Aug 2026

The Coding Round Did Not Match Earlier Reports

Process: OA → HR BQ → ML Case → ML Knowledge → Coding, for four interview rounds in total. I should be done here. OA: The same questions as the 2023 version on the forum. If you read through the interview reports here from beginning to end, you should basically be fine. HM BQ: The questions went into more detail than I expected. There were a lot of self-evaluation questions, such as what I though…

RejectedOnsite0
ByteDanceSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Alien Dictionary and One Costly Indentation Bug

The problem was Alien Dictionary. I expected the interviewer to ask about my background in detail, but the interview opened directly with a LeetCode problem. I knew how to solve this one, but I could not write it bug-free. I eventually found that I had indented a break statement in the wrong place. I managed to get my own test to pass before the interview ended, but the interviewer's feedback was…

Technical Screen0
OpenAIResearch Engineer
Aug 2026

Two Back-to-Back Screens, No Break, Rejected

Sharing a recent phone screen with OpenAI for an RE (security track) role. I got rejected — hope this helps people getting ready for one of these. Interview format Two rounds, 60 minutes each, back to back, with no break in between. There was no round-specific prompt, just the generic Technical Interview Preparation PDF the recruiter sends out, which I'm assuming everyone gets the same version of…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
RobloxFrontend EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

Phone Screen Piano Keys Coding Challenge

Phone Interview Coding/design question: Piano Keys Implement a UI with 6 piano keys (C, D, E, F, G, A) that responds to user input. Must be built with vanilla HTML/CSS/JavaScript only — no frameworks or third-party libraries. When a key is pressed and held, it should show a pressed state (i.e., add the pre-styled .key.active class to the corresponding element); when released, it should immediatel…

Technical Screen0
StripeSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Aug 2026

Rejected After AI Coding and Integration + Bug Squash Onsite

Writing down my 2027 NG Stripe rejection (and, I think, the most complete set of Stripe NG prep material out there). Timeline 2026.9.3 the role opened and I got a referral from a friend -> 2026.9.4 got the OA -> 2026.9.6 finished the OA, all test cases passed in half an hour -> 2026.9.10 got an email from HR to schedule the Technical Screening -> booked it for 9.16 -> on 9.16 the interviewer had…

RejectedOnsite0
AmazonBusiness Intelligence Engineer
Aug 2026

Deep Leadership Follow-ups, SQL, and Data Visualization

I am sharing the BIE phone interview that I just failed. I hope it can help everyone. A senior DE interviewed me and brought along a junior AE. Leadership BQ They first looked at my resume and asked about projects I had done and about leadership. The questions went very deep. After one A/B test, did I run any other tests? What kind of trade-off led to not launching? Which team did I work with? Wa…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
IntuitStaff Software EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

Two Long Screens and a Final-Round Rejection

Intuit's interview process had two rounds. The process was long, but HR was patient. The final round was a big production too. First round: Coding The interviewer was very nice and kept encouraging me. The first coding problem was to design a rate limiter. Requirement: design a rate limiter that allows five people through during each time period. Then the design was extended: when VIP users arriv…

RejectedOnsite0
HarveyAI Agent
Aug 2026

Three Rounds and a Frustrating Empty Office

It was a surreal onsite experience. I had practiced the phone-screen problem many times. It was the Google Sheets problem, and I finished it immediately. The recruiter told me about an hour later that I had passed, then arranged the onsite. There were three rounds. For system design, I was asked to design an agent that scores a file according to a set of rules and labels it qualified, acceptable,…

RejectedOnsite0
AmazonSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Two Leadership Principles and Two Whiteboard Problems

Before the interview, the recruiter scheduled a call and said the interview would focus mainly on two Leadership Principles. The recruiter suggested preparing the related behavioral questions in advance using the STAR format. The first behavioral portion stayed mostly around those two Leadership Principles. After the first question, the interviewer dug further into the trade-off, so that discussi…

In progressTechnical Screen0
AtlassianSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

45-Minute Phone Screen with Rate Limiter Coding and System Design

45 minutes of coding + SD. It seems like there's no Karat anymore? The interviewer was also a current Atlassian employee. Coding Implement a simple rate limiter, assume all input values are valid. Part 1: check(time_bucket: int) -> bool The time bucket never decreases. Each call to this function counts as one more request in that time bucket. If the number of requests in the time bucket is greate…

Technical Screen0
SnapchatData Scientist
Aug 2026

Unexpected Regression Questions and Camera-Event SQL

The recruiter told me that the technical screen would cover only SQL and statistics and probability. I could not find any new interview reports from this year on the forum. Reports from previous years covered dice probabilities, SQL-finding questions, and similar topics. The questions I actually received were completely different from what I had prepared, so I failed... I am sharing them to help…

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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