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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RipplingSoftware EngineerSenior+
Jul 2026

30-Minute Recruiter Chat, Rejected the Next Day

I got a reach-out email from their recruiter and we scheduled a 30-minute quick chat. The HR person was 5 minutes late, but it was no big deal, I've seen this a lot. After she joined she said she wouldn't turn her camera on, and told me I didn't have to either. Then we got started. Intro and work experience She first asked me to introduce myself, and I went over my work history. Then she asked me…

RejectedHR Screen0
AnthropicSoftware EngineerSenior+
Jul 2026

HR Screen Loaded with AI Safety and Personal Morals Questions

Just finished my HR call with Anthropic. It was a referral from a colleague, but honestly my background doesn't match the JD that well, so overall I got the sense she hadn't decided yet whether to move me on to the technical interview. The official line was that they'd decide in one or two days. She asked me a bunch of questions: What does the team do You said you're a tech lead — what does your…

In progressHR Screen0
StripeSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

OA to Onsite, Including an AI Pair-Coding Round and a Real GitHub Bug Bash

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OnsitePremium0
AppleSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Remote K8s Role, Passed Two Screens Then Bumped for an Internal Transfer

Screening: I had to hand-write a consistent hashing ring from scratch; then K8s questions, like where do you start when a pod has a problem; and finding a bug in some Terraform. The result came back on the spot, and half an hour later the recruiter replied to schedule the phone screen. All I can say is, fast. Phone screen: they gave me skeleton code for a union find and I had to fill it in. Then…

No responseTechnical Screen0
AnthropicSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Two-Day Onsite With System Design, Project Deep Dive, and Culture

Process Recruiter call. Phone screen (coding) — a question that had already shown up on this forum. Phone screen with the hiring manager — again, a question already posted here. Onsite: four rounds. Onsite Day one: two system design rounds, both domain specific, not much reference value since they're not the kind of thing that gets asked repeatedly on this forum. Day two: project dive deep + cult…

Onsite0
Hudson River TradingSoftware EngineerIntern
Jul 2026

A LeetCode-Easy Tree Path Question With No C++ Trivia

Fresh C++ SWE (Intern) first-round interview report Last week I had my first round for the C++ SWE (intern) position, a 1-hour Zoom coding interview. We spent a few minutes at the start briefly chatting about background, then moved into the problem. The question: given a binary tree where each node has an integer value, and a target, determine whether there's a path from root to leaf where the su…

In progressTechnical Screen0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Ran Out of Time on an Onsite Coding Round, Talked Through the Answer Instead

Just finished my Google onsite. Something came up in one of the coding rounds, and I want to ask the folks and interviewers here on the forum how they'd read this: r2, first question: the piano-finger-movement problem (sliding window, similar to finding a monotonic interval / window coverage). First part: I wrote the code fast, dry-ran the interviewer's three test cases live plus a couple of edge…

In progressOnsite0
OpenAIiOS EngineerSenior+
Jul 2026

Rejected After a Flawless Technical Screen

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RejectedTechnical ScreenPremium0
UberSoftware EngineerIntern
Jul 2026

OA with a Delivery-Cost, Truck-Collision, and Org-Tree Broadcast Problem

OA Problem 1 There are n cities, each with a deliveryCharge value. Delivering from city i to city j can be costed in two ways: The cost is abs(deliveryCharge[i] - deliveryCharge[j]) If city j is city i's unique nearest city, the cost is 1 The distance between cities is defined as abs(deliveryCharge[i] - deliveryCharge[j]). Given a queries array where each entry is [Start, End], compute the minimu…

Online Assessment0
Hudson River TradingSoftware EngineerIntern
Jul 2026

Two Phone Screens, from Deque O(1) Indexing to Stream Buffering

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Technical ScreenPremium0
Hudson River TradingSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Four OA Questions, C++ Required

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Online AssessmentPremium0
Hudson River TradingAlgo Engineer
Jul 2026

Rejected After Two Phone Screens

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RejectedTechnical ScreenPremium0
Hudson River TradingSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Jul 2026

Online Assessment: Text Segmentation and Suffix-Pair Problems

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Online AssessmentPremium0
Hudson River TradingAlgorithm Development InternIntern
Jul 2026

A Probability Round on Mean vs. Median Estimators

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Technical ScreenPremium0
RampApplied AI Engineer
Jul 2026

Rejected Before the 25-Minute OA Even Closed

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RejectedOnline AssessmentPremium0
Mistral AIAI ScientistNew Grad
Jul 2026

Seven Rounds, Rejected at the Final Step

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RejectedOnsitePremium0
Mistral AIScientist
Jul 2026

Three Technical Rounds in One Day After the Initial Screen

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RejectedOnsitePremium0
RampSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Failed the Latency Tradeoff on a Hotel Booking System Design

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RejectedTechnical ScreenPremium0
PinterestSite Reliability EngineerSenior+
Jul 2026

Phone Screen With a Four-Part GET Request and IP Counting Task, Then Silence

I have no SRE experience, but I have 7 years as a cloud SDE and I've always been part of the oncall rotation. I was recently laid off and I'm in a hurry to find a job. Pinterest didn't have a role that fit me especially well, so I just applied to a Senior SRE role to try my luck, and I got a phone screen invitation. The recruiter said the early questions would be similar to LeetCode coding proble…

No responseTechnical Screen0
OptiverSoftware EngineerIntern
Jul 2026

A 90-Minute OOD/State-Machine OA on CPU Core Cooling

I recently finished this company's Summer SDE Intern OA, so I'm writing this post to give back to the community. There were two parts in total. One part was a HackerRank OA (90 minutes), an OOD / state machine simulation problem — a puzzle game kind of like Tower of Hanoi. Problem overview Implement an OverheatPreventionController class to simulate and manage the temperature and cooling state of…

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.

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