Real Interview Experiences
Learn what to expect directly from candidates and interviewers who've been through it.
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“The recruiter told me comp was 'beyond competitive' and 'never a concern,' then immediately said they usually downlevel people by one or two levels. I'd never had any company say that out loud on the very first call.”
“By the time I got to OpenAI, I’d interviewed with 11 or 12 companies, so my behavioral was very well rehearsed. I kept openings in my answers so if they followed up, they’d go where I wanted them to go.”
“Both product sense rounds followed this exact theme of, "we have this magical technology, help us figure out what to do with it," and one prompt was literally speech to animal language. It was actually really fun to work on.”
“One thing that stood out was the SQL round. They gave me this AI-generated, very modular code and asked me to read the logic like a human, then basically debug what the machine was doing wrong.”
“One interviewer literally opened with, “I don’t know why I keep getting booked for these,” and then asked me how I’d handle launching a new model if the first two years would lose $2 trillion. I was like, what is this, bro?”
“The recruiter said to expect LeetCode medium hard, but I got this very practical Excel problem around formulas, caching, and invalidation. The most unique part was the project deep dive where they really tried to cut through the BS and ask what I actually did.”
“The coding plus ML stats round was the hardest by far. They basically asked me to implement an all_gather on noisy nodes, derive how many rounds you’d need for a target error, then figure out a better algorithm using the fact you’re transmitting floats.”
“They gave me all the behavioral questions ahead of time, so I almost relaxed a little, and then more than half of every interview was just follow-up questions. It felt like they didn’t really care about the initial question itself.”
“Funnily enough, I work at Replit, and even for our interviews we have candidates use AI. What you're testing now isn't correctness of code, it's whether someone can reason about the code that gets generated, and OpenAI hadn't really adopted that mindset yet.”
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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.”
