Interview Experiences

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

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MicrosoftSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Four Back-to-Back Rounds, and I Was Late to the First One

Before the interview they gave me two time windows to choose from, morning or afternoon. After I picked one, it was four rounds back to back, about an hour each. Part 1: The process and the questions Round 1 | BQ + quick-fire technical concepts + algorithm The interviewer was a guy based in Pittsburgh. BQ: Have you ever been blocked for a long time? How did you solve the problem and keep moving f…

Onsite0
MicrosoftSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

A 90-Minute OA and Only Time for Brute Force

The latest OA: 90 minutes, two questions, with AI hints for the second question. I only managed to write a brute-force solution for the second one. It probably needed DP, but I ran out of time. 2571 You are given an integer array requiredSum of length n. Build an array result of length n that satisfies all of these conditions: result is non-decreasing: result[i] ≤ result[i + 1] for every valid i.…

Online Assessment0
Capital OneSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Four Coding Questions in the Online Assessment

Given an array, find the first element whose two adjacent neighbors are both strictly larger. Given 2 arrays with the same length n, calculate the sum of absolute diff for each cyclic t-shift of nums1 with nums2. Return a list of all sums sorted in nondescending order. Given a 2D matrix and a pattern, return the coordinate of the submatrix with the lowest row index and lowest column. The submatri…

Online Assessment0
Otter.aiSoftware EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

Two Tech Screens, Three Onsites and a Silent Coding Interviewer

Tech Screen - 1 LC 2654 with one of the SDEs from the company. The focus was on executing code so that it compiles, not a lot of focus on edge cases etc. I was able to get this through with minimal help. Tech Screen - 2 A Senior Manager from the team. I explained project work with a presentation. Onsite 1 Another senior manager doing behavioral questions. Onsite 2 Google Docs system design with a…

Onsite0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

L4 Virtual Onsite, 12 Minutes of Coding on a Vague String-Templating Question

First round VO, coding — the interviewer gave me this question: given a KV map and a string where keys are marked as indices, replace the parts of the string wrapped in %% with the corresponding value from the KV map: {USER=>admin, HOME=>/%USER%/home} Input: I am %USER% My home is %HOME% Output: I am admin My home is /admin/home Then he had me come up with edge cases. My first thought was: if we…

RejectedOnsite0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Recruiter Rescheduled a Month, Rejected After One BQ Call

The experience was pretty bad. The recruiter kept rescheduling. I applied in early July and was supposed to get a phone screen about a week later, but she had stuff come up plus vacation, so it didn't actually happen until early August. Then during the call she didn't turn her camera on, and the questions were all behavioral-type stuff — things like how do you manage people, what's a technically…

RejectedHR Screen0
UiPathFrontend EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

Four Onsite Rounds, Two Left Unfinished

Their process was actually pretty fast. Overall it felt pretty average — the questions weren't especially hard, but between chatting about my resume and reading through the problems, I didn't finish several of them. Debugging round: I found a bug in the table sort, which was pretty simple. After that we spent most of the time talking about my experience with AI and harness engineering. Another de…

Onsite0
PlaidSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

A New Rule-Chain Validation Question in the Screen

Unfortunately I ran into a question that wasn't posted here before. This was a few weeks ago, and the interviewer was a woman. Question: Chain Validation The system has a set of validation rules. Each rule has two fields: [rule name, result] The result can be one of three things: "pass" — the rule passes "fail" — the rule fails the name of another rule — meaning the final result of the current ru…

Technical Screen0
DoorDashSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Recruiter Call to a Four-Round Virtual Onsite, No Offer

Recruiter call: overall this was standard - basic info questions, no BQ really came up in this round. I recall being asked why DoorDash. Passed in a day or two, then got scheduled for the next round quickly - pretty efficient. Code Craft: a simplified version of Dasher Pay, simplified in that there was no coding extension like a double pay rate window. Instead, after finishing the basic coding, t…

RejectedOnsite0
Salient AiSoftware EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

The Final Onsite Round Was Canceled on the Spot

Position: Senior Software Engineer, Core Product. The onsite was in San Francisco and was originally scheduled for 3 hours. Round 1: Live coding (1 hour) Practical coding, not LeetCode. It was a duplicate-files type of question: given a set of filesystem helpers, deduplicate files by their contents. The follow-ups kept digging into I/O and read optimizations. Round 2: System design (1 hour) A que…

RejectedOnsite0
Applied IntuitionSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Aggressive Interruptions on a Coding Phone Screen

HR call: Two different HR people reached out to me. It was basically background chat. The first HR felt like they came out of a frat, very flippant, and asked me this kind of dumb question about why I'd choose to accept a return offer and go back to a certain company as a full-time employee. The second one asked what I wanted out of my next job, and then asked to schedule the interview right ther…

Technical Screen0
InstacartSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Five-Round AI Online Assessment

I barely scraped by. As far as I can tell, there's currently only one question in the question bank — a library book search/borrowing system. There's already a very detailed writeup of this question in another post, so I'll just add a few of my own thoughts here: For round 1 and round 4, when talking to the AI PM, try to put all your questions into a single prompt and have the AI PM answer everyt…

In progressOnline Assessment0
LegoraSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

A System Design Round with Almost No Coding

This one was basically the same as another writeup I'd already seen about this company's process. Round 1 was a project deep dive. Round 2 was system design + coding, though the coding part was so small it felt kind of pointless. I originally thought the coding portion would take 45 minutes, but this second round actually leaned much more toward system design. They gave me a chat app setup, asked…

Onsite0
NutanixSoftware EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

Guidelines Promised Three Rounds, Got Two Algorithm Interviews Instead

The phone screen just asked a few casual questions, then they sent an OA on HackerRank — 3 questions, an hour and a half total. After I finished it I got the interview, and what was pretty ridiculous is that the guidelines they sent and what the actual interview turned out to be were completely different. The intro said 3 rounds: one coding round, one "Advanced problem-solving coding" round, and…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
VisaSoftware EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

Online Assessment with Perfect Substring and Connected Groups

Online Assessment First question: Perfect Substring Given a string s made up only of digits, and an integer k, we need to find the number of substrings that satisfy a specific condition: every distinct digit character that appears in the substring must appear exactly k times. Input: string s and integer k Output: the total count of substrings satisfying the condition Example: if s = "11020211" an…

Online Assessment0
SIG (Susquehanna)Software Engineer
Aug 2026

Nailed Every Onsite Question, Still Got Rejected

In May, someone from SIG reached out, so I figured I'd give it a shot and set up a recruiter call, which quickly turned into a phone interview. The phone interview was the classic "movie search" problem — basically you're given a CSV-format list of movies and asked to design a class that supports fast filtering, like pulling movies from year xx to year yy. Also, the constructor's time complexity…

RejectedOnsite0
YahooMachine Learning Engineer
Aug 2026

60-Minute Screen With a Numpy Embedding Ranking Question

60 minutes, coding + ML knowledge. The coding had to be done with numpy. The input was a user embedding vector and N item embedding vectors. Taking the dot product of the two gives a similarity score. The task was to sort the N items by score from high to low, and the output is the list of item indices after sorting. The follow-up: if the user has already seen some of those items, filter the seen…

Technical Screen0
MicrosoftSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

HackerRank OA with Two Coding Problems, Then VO

Microsoft SWE II OA, HackerRank, two coding problems. I passed and moved on to the VO. [Questions] Q1: Given a string, look at the substrings whose length is in [minLength, maxLength] and whose number of distinct characters is <= maxUnique, and return the highest frequency among them. Similar to LC 1297. n goes up to 1e5, maxLength <= 26. Example: abcde, length 2 to 4, maxUnique unlimited, the an…

Online Assessment0
AirbnbSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

In-Memory File System OA, Four Levels Deep

The OA was an in-memory file system design problem: add files, copy files search files with prefix and suffix add users with capacity, add files by user, update user capacity compress and decompress files L1 and L2 were pretty straightforward. L3 required handling the relationship between users and files, and you had to modify the copy_file from L2. The copied file also has a size, and if size >…

Online Assessment0
AndurilSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Onsite Coding Went Great, Then the HM's System Design Round Sank It

This role was billed as fullstack, but the interviews barely touched anything front-end related. And the final round — I got screwed over by the hiring manager. The phone screen was on 4/17. After I finished it we just chatted. The next day HR told me I passed and moved on to the onsite (VO). VO Coding 1 Question 1: a simple calculator that only needs to support addition and subtraction. ["+", 1,…

RejectedOnsite0

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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