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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CiscoSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Rejected for Background Mismatch After a Resume-Heavy Technical Screen

My first round was a technical phone screen with a TL. They said it was technical, but since my experience and the role (low level/embedding) weren't a great match, they spent a lot of time deep-diving into my resume. On top of that, my big-tech infra project architecture was fairly simple, and I had to explain some of the tools I'd used, so before I knew it, 50 minutes were gone. The coding ques…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
Walmart LabsSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

A Hard Interval Problem I Blanked On in the Phone Screen

The interview had two interviewers who came on together. They said they were hiring for different teams, so both of them figured they'd sit in and take a look. The original problem turned out to be an exact match for one I recognized by name, word for word — but I had actually never gone through and solved it myself before. My approach wasn't too far off: try to store the interval information, th…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
AnthropicSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Technical Screen on Designing a P2P Model Downloader

The question was about downloading a model. It went so-so, even though the question itself was actually the simplest version of it. The main issue was that download and upload shared a 10Gbps bandwidth cap — not sure if the interviewer just picked that number randomly. The main problem was that early on I spent a lot of time performing — working through and explaining the optimal algorithm. I'd a…

In progressTechnical Screen0
HexSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Five Onsite Rounds and Feedback for Leaning Too Much on AI

I just got done with my onsite interview at Hex, so I wanted to contribute this data point. For the full stack track, I went through quite a few rounds: web dev, system design, product taste, behavioral, and a CTO round. The feedback I ended up getting was that the web dev round relied too much on AI... Personally, I think the line for this kind of AI-native interview format is actually pretty ha…

Onsite0
AmazonSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Jul 2026

Leadership Principle BQs and an Edit Distance Follow-up

Round 1 BQ1: Give an example of how you organized a product. BQ2: Give an example of a time you missed a deadline. BQ3: Talk about a time you thought something was wrong but stuck to your own view. Prepare your stories using the STAR method. Except for the first two — "the project you're most proud of" type stories — try to add lessons learned to the rest. Tell the story in a concise, easy-to-fol…

Onsite0
PatreonSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Technical Phone Screen on an In-Memory Rate Limiter

The question was the rate limit one. You need to use an in-memory rate limiter to protect an API endpoint. The rate limiter is initialized with a value that represents the maximum number of requests allowed per second. Every time a request hits the API endpoint, it first asks the rate limiter whether there is still capacity to handle the request, and the rate limiter decides based on that whether…

Technical Screen0
FigmaData Scientist
Jul 2026

A Low-Energy Hiring Manager Round Worth Avoiding

Sharing my interview experience with Figma DS for the HM round — overall it was really bad. This is the only company where I finished the interview and immediately wanted to warn everyone else away from it. They started by asking about my background and introducing the role. The HM seemed really low energy, like they were just going through the motions. They asked about a project and my work back…

Onsite0
AffirmSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

A Log-Matching Question That Fed Into a Trust Score

Affirm phone screen — should be for an SDE2 role. The interviewer started with casual mutual introductions for about 10-15 minutes (didn't feel like it needed to take that long, but she kept talking and I didn't want to interrupt). The question was about two days of logs — find users who show up in both days and have loan type >= 2. The second part was to calculate a trust score. I finished writi…

In progressTechnical Screen0
AppleSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Two Phone Screens, Easy Coding Then a Distributed Cache Design

This was for ASE, on the storage infra team. Phone screen round 1: the HM, 45 mins. BQ Coding 1: string run-length decoding. For example, a5b3c -> aaaaabbbc Coding 2: count the nodes in a chain. Each node can only access the node to its left and the node to its right, and you have to count how many nodes there are in total. Both problems needed test cases. Summary: the coding questions were very…

Technical Screen0
PinterestSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Phone Screen Plus a Pin Score Tracker Onsite Round

Phone Screen: problem similar to leetcode 815. Virtual onsite Interview 1 (DS): Imagine each Pin on Pinterest has a "trending score" associated with it. You're asked to build a feature which keeps track of all the Pins a user has seen in the last week and at any given time shows the top trending Pin that has been viewed by this user. (ie. Of all the Pins user123 has viewed in the last 24 hours, l…

Onsite0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Extra System Design Round, Then a Template Rejection

Coding: It was the same as what's in the other interview write-ups, the chatbot that needs a refactor. The only difference was that for every person who is away, whenever someone @s them, the bot just directly replies with the away status. SD: CloudIDE. Maybe the interviewer wasn't very clear on what they wanted either, so I gave them an SSH version, where one person or several people can share a…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
AppleFull Stack Engineer
Jul 2026

React JS and Java Coding Rounds

React JS Coding Round In incognito mode, if you open a site like Amazon.com or Flipkart.com, what are some ways to optimize the page's load speed? Is JavaScript single-threaded or multi-threaded? What is the event loop? Does JS execute top to bottom, or the other way around? If you fetch 10M records via an API in JS and render them in a table in the UI, what problems show up in the UI? How would…

Technical Screen0
PlaidSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Coding Round with a 3-Milestone Pipeline Problem

There were two rounds total: the first was coding, and the second was a project deep-dive where I had to put together my own PPT slides presenting a project. Plaid coding interview experience. The question was about an automation pipeline, with 3 milestones that added conditions progressively. Milestone 1: single worker — calculate how many jobs get completed within the time limit. The pipeline i…

Technical Screen0
VantaSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Four-Part Onsite Ending in Rejection

I had my onsite (VO) on Monday and Tuesday. Three days later, today, the recruiter just emailed saying they decided to move forward with other candidates who are the best fit for the role. They asked if I wanted to talk through feedback. Overall I felt the interviewers were pretty good — they were responsive. At the start the recruiter gives you a Google doc with a pretty detailed writeup describ…

RejectedOnsite0
Serval
Jul 2026

Interview Ended at 60 of 90 Minutes, Still Rejected

The onsite interview was 90 minutes: an hour of coding plus 30 minutes of DB schema design. The coding part had two sub-questions. You're given a list-based stream where each item has a timestamp (sorted ascending) and a motion intensity between 0 and 1. Given a threshold, find all the continuous time periods where the motion intensity is greater than or equal to the threshold, and return the sta…

RejectedOnsite0
CitadelSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Onsite Design Round Interrupted Nonstop by a Confused Interviewer

I just finished interviewing for Citadel Securities' C++ SWE position, and the whole experience was very negative, so I'm posting here to vent. The phone screen was an external merge sort with a heap. The interviewer was decent, and the overall experience was fine. After that, they quickly scheduled the onsite and told me there'd be five rounds total: design + 2h coding + 1h code review + 1h proj…

Onsite0
ClickupSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Full Loop Ending in an AI Search Index System Design I Couldn't Answer

HM round - with an org director. We mostly talked about my own experience, no BQ or anything like that. It felt like they were mainly checking whether the things I've done match what they need. Coding - fairly easy, one of the questions from the forum's interview question bank, the doc edit events one. Project deep dive - talked with an org tech lead about my own experience, and it was mostly abo…

Onsite0
SnowflakeSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Two Onsite Coding Rounds, Rejected Over a Tricky Input Assumption

Two onsite rounds, mid-level, both coding. Both rounds were repeat questions I'd seen before, but they happened to be from the few I hadn't practiced. A bit unlucky. Overall the interview experience was fine — the interviewers were all nice, and they asked me a lot about how I use AI in my day-to-day developing cycle. Wiki Hopper — basically a webpage has multiple links that let you jump to other…

RejectedOnsite0
InstacartSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

A Single CodeSignal OA Question With Five Escalating Follow-ups

The first step was an OA on CodeSignal. There was a lot of identity verification along the way — anti-cheating checks. It was one question with multiple follow-ups, getting progressively harder. The OA email said you didn't need to finish everything, and honestly I don't think it's possible to finish it all — 90 minutes, 5 parts. The problem gave you template code. Implement account creation: cre…

In progressOnline Assessment0
AmazonSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

A Segmented-Array OA Problem That Even ChatGPT Couldn't Solve

I got Amazon's OA and started it one day right after waking up from a nap. I wasn't in a good state though, and I ended up getting a rejection. Question 1 Coding, 40 minutes. I wrote one version and only passed 4 cases — the other hidden cases threw some memory errors. It wasn't until after it ended that I realized there must have been a space constraint, which is why I was getting those memory-r…

RejectedOnline 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.

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