Real Interview Experiences
Learn what to expect directly from candidates and interviewers who've been through it.
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“My strongest Google round was with a senior interviewer who never opened a LeetCode prompt. He just asked what I knew about algorithms, pushed me into distributed merge sort from first principles, and apparently got more signal from that than a standard coding screen.”
“I’d been applying to Google for five years, like 50 to 100 times, with and without referrals, and this one just randomly responded. Honestly, I think for TPM it’s a chance thing, so sometimes you just get yourself in the door through PGM and switch later.”
“One of my onsite interviewers pasted a prompt that was basically one sentence long and then just sat back. That round made it click for me that Google was testing how I clarified and structured the problem, not whether I could speedrun a DSA coding problem.”
“They were trying to team match me to a Gemini role before the loop, and then in strategy it got almost combative. Every idea was, 'Slack can do that too, so how are you going to compete with free?'”
“It was an internship role, AI engineer. First was an online coding round on arrays and strings where I had to return a palindromic subsequence, and later they asked dynamic programming and a linked list hard question.”
“I just found like nervousness dropped my IQ like 20 points, so I ended up doing a lot of mocks with GPT. Then I started seeing way more causal inference in interviews, like the field can go back to the science part.”
“I probably did at least 10 solid 12 hour days of prep and kind of overprepped into oblivion, and then the interviews were so loosey goosey I barely got to show my thinking before they hired someone internal.”
“What surprised me most was that after typing a simple URL in the browser, they expected me to drive the whole conversation end to end, from DNS and system calls to interrupts and sockets, and then defend every layer.”
“I’d never had to do vibe coding live before. In the product design interview, they gave me 10 to 15 minutes to actually build a rough prototype, and most of what they were probing on was how I prompted and reprompted the tool.”
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“The weirdest Anthropic round was the company values interview. It was almost like a therapy session, and honestly if you went to a therapist at some point, you will pass that round much more easily.”
“What was very unusual is they didn’t give me any tooling to draw the system design, so I just sketched it on a piece of paper and talked them through it, then we got into this oddly deep debate about whether hover-over history should count as a recommendation signal.”
