Real Interview Experiences
Learn what to expect directly from candidates and interviewers who've been through it.
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“They showed me this intentionally vague architecture with Kafka, Jupyter, and an experiment dashboard, and the whole prompt was basically just, "it’s slow." Then they pivoted to a custom system training LLMs across 500 nodes and kept drilling into failure modes and latency.”
“I got the vibe they were really looking for ex-founders, because they kept pushing on why my side projects never hit production, and one interview was literally turning a Disney-style dubbing spreadsheet into a slick collaborative product.”
“In the second coding round, he shared a bunch of code for some LLM thing and kept saying, "go through the code, go through the code" whenever I asked for inputs or outputs. I didn’t write a single line, and honestly I was glad when the next round got canceled.”
“At Lovable, what I thought was a recruiter call suddenly became an on the spot TypeScript coding test. He shared his screen, pointed at a bunch of functions, and I had to explain what would happen without even touching the code.”
“Anthropic was very different from the 20 companies I interviewed with. The culture round felt like a lawyer call, very interrogative, with conscience based questions like when have you done something against your values, and after that round I was like, is it still worth it?”
“I told Sierra I’d only worked in Python, they said that was fine, and then my first onsite was a TypeScript React debugging round where the interviewer showed up 10 or 15 minutes late and was super rude and cold.”
“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.”
“I noticed Matty Roy’s name because he was the xAI guy who tweeted that if Grok couldn’t generate erotica, you could just post it on Twitter, and then I interviewed with him like a week later, which was pretty interesting.”
“Lyft rejected me after the SQL take-home because I built this whole Python pipeline to pull from their locked spreadsheet and they were basically like, this could have been done with simpler query logic. Then at Uber, my roommate stopped me from over-indexing on PCA charts and told me, nobody knows what PCA is, Mark.”
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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.”
