Interview Experiences

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

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RobloxSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Hat Assignments in an Early-Career Onsite

The author reports two coding interviews during a Roblox early-career virtual onsite. One problem asked for the number of valid hat assignments and the highest score obtainable when hats carry point values. The author considered dynamic programming or backtracking, noting that the smaller input size might permit the latter. The second problem was identified only as a Candy Crush exercise, without…

Onsite0
AmazonSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Robot Coordination and File-Watcher Design

The author describes a first-round Amazon phone interview organized into technical questions followed by leadership-focused discussion. The applicant reports completing an initial coding problem quickly. Additional technical topics concerned coordinating multiple robots in a restaurant and designing a Kafka-related file-watching system that could handle millions of files. The robot scenario requi…

Technical Screen0
SnowflakeSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Tree Deletions and Four-in-a-Row Detection

The author reports two Snowflake coding interviews, each lasting about an hour in an executable editor without AI assistance. The sessions included introductions or project discussion, technical work, and time for questions. The first round examined a multi-child tree where deleting a node promotes its children rather than removing its entire subtree. The initial task asked for the resulting heig…

Technical Screen0
CiscoSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

QA Questions from an Acquired Team

This was a team from a company Cisco acquired. The questions were mostly about my experience and open questions, and these interviews really come down to luck, so these are just the ones I remember. Everyone was pretty nice and happy to share their own experiences. If you can successfully ping a server, does that mean port 443 is accessible? How do you test a new feature? How do you drive improve…

Onsite0
SIG (Susquehanna)Quantitative Trader
Sep 2026

Online Assessment with Randomized Probability, Combinatorics and Logic Puzzles

The questions are similar to the ones you can find online, but there are some variants. All the specific numbers and shapes are randomly generated. Below is a summary done with AI, in shuffled order. Probability and Bayes' Theorem Factory A produces $a\%$ red parts and $(100-a)\%$ black parts, and Factory B produces $b\%$ red parts and $(100-b)\%$ black parts. A factory is picked at random and $k…

Online Assessment0
VisaSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Sep 2026

Three-Question OA Ending in a Shortest-Prefix Permutation Problem

Visa's latest OA questions. Three questions in total: the first two were fundamental questions, and the third was an intermediate question. Question 1 I don't remember the problem statement clearly. It was fairly basic; I remember you needed a hashmap optimization to avoid TLE. Question 2 Given an integer array (a vector). For each integer in the array, find the minimum k such that: It is a posit…

Online Assessment0
PinterestSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Full Loop, Rejected on the Newly Added AI Coding Round

Phone screen: LeetCode 1055 It was split into two parts. Part 1 only checks whether the target can be formed at all; once that ran and passed, I did the second part. For Part 2 I first tried recursion + greedy, but it had a bug and couldn't guarantee the optimal solution. After fixing that I wrote a recursive version that passed. But the interviewer wanted an iterative approach, so the rest was t…

RejectedOnsite0
Retell AISoftware EngineerNew Grad
Sep 2026

Six-Day Workweek Question and a Two-Level Flight Search OA

I mass-applied about a month ago, got an update a week ago, and dragged my feet on the OA until the deadline before I finally did it. Recruiter interview: right off the bat they asked whether I could accept working six days a week, then it was just some basic questions (project, tech stack, trade-offs). OA: Not hard overall, but there's a lot of text, so you have to actually read it. Implement a…

In progressOnline Assessment0
RedditSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

A Word-Search Rule Clarified Too Late

The author reports an unsuccessful Reddit coding screen involving word search. After presenting the task, the interviewer remained quiet while the applicant worked. The author did not confirm the movement rules and implemented a more permissive search than the interviewer expected. A typo also consumed about ten minutes. Although the applicant’s own tests passed, the interviewer said near the end…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
DatabricksSoftware EngineerSenior+
Sep 2026

Downleveled from L6 to L5, Same Question Twice, Rejected

I applied for L6 with 9 years of experience, and got a referral. The HR screen questions made me a little uncomfortable. Starting from the first company after I graduated all the way to my current one, they asked about every single one why I left and whether I got promoted. But the HR seemed nice, and scheduled a phone screen for a week later. Phone screen: the book seller question. Honestly I di…

RejectedOnsite0
Capital OneSoftware EngineerIntern
Sep 2026

Superday With a Case Study and an AI-Assisted Coding Round

The Superday was three parts, behavioral (standard), case study, and AI assisted coding. The case study covered the use of virtual credit cards and had multiple sub-parts. After weighing the tradeoffs of virtual cards, you analyze some virtual card numbers and see what specific conditions they fulfill and you debug some code regarding the conditionals for filtering these card numbers. The AI assi…

Onsite0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Positive Feedback, Rejected for a Better Background Match

Interview experience for an OpenAI team-specific hire. Just giving a little back to the forum. Phone screen: Coding: GPU Credit 2 System Design: Payment System About a week after the phone screen I had an HM chat, and after that I moved on to the onsite. Onsite: Coding: Plant Infection System Design: Design Steam Deep Dive HM Chat (with a neighboring team) The Deep Dive and the HM Chat were both…

RejectedOnsite0
AffirmSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Failed the Easy Card Game Problem in the Technical Screen

I had reviewed nothing but hard problems and never reviewed this easy kind of one, and of course that's what I got. Ha. The problem: 52 playing cards, shuffle first, and each person takes a pile. Each round you compare whose top card is bigger. The side with the bigger card seems to take the other side's card too and put it aside together with their own (I forgot the exact rules, but I think that…

Technical Screen0
VerkadaSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Phone Screen Coding a Host Log Key-Value Parser

Interview question summary: Host Log Parser (key-value pairs) Background and goal Background: host systems and IoT edge devices (such as network cameras, access controllers, gateways, and so on) continuously produce runtime logs. Every log line starts with the timestamp of the event, followed by some key-value pairs joined with an equals sign. Goal: write a Python program that reads a log file an…

Technical Screen0
DecagonSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Rejected After the Onsite Culture Screen

First was a hiring call with Decagon. Then a technical phone screen, which was a shopping cart problem with redo and undo. Next was a system design phone screen, where I had to design security for the Decagon chatbot. The onsite was a culture screen. They asked pretty generic questions like tell me about a project, tell me about a project that went wrong, and how do you use AI. I was rejected imm…

RejectedOnsite0
IBMSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Six Recorded Behavioral Questions, 1 Minute to Prep and 3 to Answer

Six questions in total, 1 minute to prepare, 3 minutes to answer. Questions: Tell me about a time you used an AI tool to help you create something. How did you work out what it could and could not do well, and what did you check or change before relying on its output? Tell me about a time something you created did not work as expected. How did you work out why, and looking back, what might you ha…

Online Assessment0
Citadel SecuritiesResearch Engineer
Sep 2026

I Built a Transformer When a Decision Tree Would Do, Then Got Ghosted

I work in tech. Every time I get ready to switch jobs, a pile of workload drags me back, so I just kind of go with the flow. Three months ago (I had 4.5 YOE at the time), a recruiter reached out saying some trading companies could do 3-days-a-week hybrid in Florida. Then the team they actually lined up didn't match the pitch lol, they said it was New York only. I wasn't that interested and honest…

No responseTechnical Screen0
HarveySoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Phone Screen Building an Excel set_cell/get_cell in Three Scopes

Another Excel set_cell and get_cell problem. It starts out really simple and then ramps up step by step, and time was still really tight while writing it. Scope 1 Implement a simple Excel. You need and In step one, set only takes numbers, no formulas, so I'd suggest getting through it fast and not wasting time. Scope 2 Step two adds the ability to set a formula, e.g. set_cell("A1", "=B1+C1+1") or…

Technical Screen0
Citadel SecuritiesSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Trade Data and Timestamp Precision

The author reports a Citadel Securities process with an initial recruiter screen and two technical interviews, without an online assessment. A New York team lead conducted a one-hour session involving trade reconciliation, behavioral questions, and design follow-ups. A London lead then held a longer-than-scheduled interview combining another trade-data task with detailed resume discussion. The ac…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
InstacartSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

AI Debugging and Unclear Coding Assumptions

The author reports an unsuccessful Instacart backend interview process involving CodeSignal assessments and human-led coding. The first onsite segment included a 90-minute library-application exercise and two hour-long coding interviews. AI was available for the application task, but only to explain code and help localize bugs, not to provide direct fixes. The author says the required changes ult…

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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