Interview Experiences

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

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Software Engineer
Sep 2026

Reported Spreadsheet Variants Across Ten Companies

The author brings together 31 interview reports involving ten companies, including OpenAI and Harvey, to compare spreadsheet implementation questions. The compilation covers basic cell access, formulas, dependency updates, circular references, and the choice between calculating values during reads or maintaining cached results during writes. It attributes different extensions to different employe…

Onsite0
AppleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Phone Screen Rejection After a Bug-Free LRU

AES team. The role was posted by someone on the forum (I don't know whether they were the hiring manager), but I applied on my own, and the recruiter reached out very quickly. The phone screen was with one interviewer. For the first thirty minutes it was behavioral questions plus a project deep dive, and I got affirmed on all sorts of things. After that came LRU, bug free, and it ran with the rig…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
OpenAIResearch Scientist
Sep 2026

New Card Game Coding Round That Tests Extensible OOD Design

The role was RS. I got a new coding problem, a card game. The first three parts were: first, implement a comparison where three of a kind > pair > high card; second, add a new hand so the order becomes three of a kind > flush > pair > high card; third, a discard rule (the rule I got is not quite the same as the one people posted on the forum, mine was to discard if it is not a pair). You can use…

Onsite0
MercorSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

30-Minute Rapid-Fire Technical Screen, Rejected After Three Questions

The first round at Mercor was a 30-minute live technical interview. It was rapid-fire Q&A, where you try to answer as many questions as possible. I only got through 3 questions, so I didn't pass. The first question was to explain in detail a sorting algorithm faster than O(n^2). I gave merge sort. The second question was to give one slower than O(n^2). For brute force you can shuffle and then com…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
BNSFSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

One-Hour Technical Screen, Coding Then Design

The technical interview was one hour, split into two parts: the first half was writing a program, the second half was design. The problem was provided through a markdown file. It was a requirements doc for a REST API, roughly a price quote (rate inquiry) endpoint for some kind of railway freight, with other dependent services and database access operations involved. I was asked to write a sample…

Technical Screen0
NVIDIASoftware EngineerNew Grad
Sep 2026

Verification Role, Offer After Eight Weeks

The interview mostly revolved around FIFO, round-robin arbiter, valid/ready handshake, scoreboard/reference model, constraints, SVA and functional coverage. They give you a small design/spec and have you discuss it from the angle of verification architecture, corner cases, assertions and coverage. They also ask brain teasers, and there are a lot of them online. The coding/RTL part is mainly basic…

OfferOnsite0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Mouse, Cheese and Cat Grid Path, a Googlyness Manager Question, and a Non-Axis-Aligned Max Rectangle

Phone Interview 1 Warmup Question: Given an N x N grid with a start cell S and a target cell T, where some cells are impassable water. You can only move horizontally or vertically. Determine whether a path from S to T exists. Main Question: Given an N x N grid. A mouse starts at S and the goal is the cheese at T. The grid also has impassable water cells and a cat C. The mouse can only move horizo…

Onsite0
Luma AISoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

AI Product Engineering Loop With a Take-home Review, CTO Chat, and Build-Uber System Design

Luma is a small-to-mid-size company, currently around 200-300 people, split mainly into research and product. The process is fast and also a bit chaotic: recruiter, take-home, onsite, offer. If the recruiter doesn't get back to you about the next step, you can follow up yourself. TC is very high, they mainly want to be in the same range as OpenAI and Anthropic, but most of it is Series C paper mo…

Onsite0
TeslaSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Supercharger System Design Where I Never Got Past the First Requirement

I was asked to design a supercharger with 3 requirements: FR1: Billing / amount of energy delivered (stored in the backend) FR2: Health metrics/telemetry from the supercharger stall (long-term data store) FR3: Screen/in-car application: touch the map, nearest available supercharger (price) I tried to follow the script and design an HLD per FR as quickly as possible, but the interviewer wanted to…

Technical Screen0
Capital OneSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Four-Question OA Where the Rotting-Oranges BFS Ate My Time

Posting this a while after the fact. I strongly recommend doing them in the order 1-2-4-3. People on the forum did say 3 was kind of hard, and I got stuck on it for ages. I'd have been better off doing 4. To explain: the easy questions up front take roughly 25 minutes, and then two mediums in 45 minutes is still pretty hard. You're better off getting full points on one of the last two questions..…

Online Assessment0
ZipHQSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

A Graph Pursuit Problem in the First Round

The author reports being rejected after a first-round Zip interview focused on a pursuit game in a finite undirected graph. Two players know each other’s locations and can move to an adjacent room or stay still, with the evading player acting first. The question concerned how long capture could take. After the applicant struggled, the interviewer suggested comparing travel distances from the two…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
Software Engineer
Sep 2026

AI-Assisted Coding and a Task-Scheduler Design

The report covers three consecutive onsite sessions: AI-assisted coding, behavioral discussion, and system design. The coding task involved a worker consuming queued jobs, retrying failures with increasing delays, and diverting repeatedly unsuccessful jobs. Although the author considered the underlying problem simple, they struggled to understand the interviewer’s expectations. The interviewer ex…

Onsite0
RenderSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Traffic Analysis and Rate Limiting

A Render phone-screen report describes an incident-response exercise framed around an API denial-of-service scenario. The candidate receives three log files and must identify the five source IP addresses responsible for the most requests across the collection. A follow-up asks how to limit request rates. The supplied examples mix HTTP request records with background-job and other service messages…

Technical Screen0
CiscoSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

HR Screen, Then a River-Crossing Brainteaser Instead of Coding

I applied for an SDE role on the Switch team. The first round was over Wedex, 30 minutes, with a female HR person. She asked things like where I live and where I'm eligible to work — that kind of question, nothing about my past experience. At the end I asked her how to prepare for the next round. She said this one would be switch-related, so I should probably brush up on some switching fundamenta…

Technical Screen1
SIG (Susquehanna)Software Engineer
Sep 2026

CodeSignal OA, Four Questions in 70 Minutes

Sharing the SIG CodeSignal I just did — same as usual, 70 minutes, 4 questions. Overall not hard, didn't need much in the way of algorithms, but there was a decent amount of code to write, and within the limited time you had to get all the little details right. Not sure if the questions are fixed — I know people who got different questions, so it might not be for the same position. The first two…

Online Assessment0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Phone Screen, Googlyness, and Two Graph-Heavy Onsite Rounds

Phone Interview Given an n x m matrix, the start is (n-1, 0) and the end is (n-1, m-1). The allowed moves are up-right, right, and down-right. Count the total number of paths to the end. Follow-up 1: There are some checkpoints in the matrix. Count the total number of paths that visit all of the checkpoints. Follow-up 2: The checkpoints must be visited in order. Given that every move changes the c…

Onsite0
AmazonSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Online Assessment Coding Question on Maximizing a Bitwise AND

Fresh out of the oven. I found the coding question really confusing. I spent a long time thinking and guessing, and I guessed bitwise AND, which turned out to be wrong. Afterwards I went back over it with Claude, and the approach it gave me was greedy + bit manipulation. Here is the summary: Problem: Given an array Arr, a count K, and a budget C. You can distribute C total "capacity" as increases…

Online Assessment0
Virtu FinancialQuantitative Researcher
Sep 2026

Five Hard Problems in a 105-Minute OA

Five problems in 105 minutes. The problems are hard difficulty, and some of them are straight LeetCode problems. Time is pretty tight. I got the OA within about two weeks of applying everywhere. Debt Transactions: LeetCode 465. Building Construction: LeetCode 2865. Reaching Points: LeetCode 780. Lifting Weights: Given an array weights of n plate weights and a barbell capacity maxCapacity, choose…

Online Assessment0
CursorSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

60-Minute Merkle Tree Phone Screen, Finished Everything and Still Rejected

Around the start of September I did a 60-minute phone screen with Cursor. After Cursor merged with SpaceX AI it got renamed to SpaceX AI. The problem was writing a Merkle tree. You have to build a Merkle tree to represent a file system, write get_hash, and write diff to compare 2 trees. You have to write all the tests yourself. The logic is the same as a Merkle tree, except a node can have N chil…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
Software Engineer
Sep 2026

Reassessing AI-Assisted Debugging After Rejection

The author reflects on rejection after a five-round onsite, following an earlier interview. Recruiter feedback identified shortcomings in both design and AI coding. The account concentrates on a 45-minute CoderPad session using a codebase of several hundred lines, with tasks revealed sequentially. Remembered work included filtering logs by severity, writing unit tests, and batching logs over five…

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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