Real Interview Experiences
Learn what to expect directly from candidates and interviewers who've been through it.
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“Google’s online assessment took me like 5 minutes and it was supposed to be 90, and that’s when I realized they really prioritize your interactions with the interviewer. You absolutely are not going to run any of your code, so if you don’t understand that landscape, you’re going to fail.”
“The mission and values round felt like some version of, are you ready to work till midnight. If I could not explain exactly why my bug-fix trace was the ground truth, the fanciest deck in the world would have died on the spot.”
“The wild part was that they basically put me through the same bar as software engineering, then only later figured out whether I fit FDE.”
“The main thing is that Anthropic had a very small question bank. When I was interviewing, I already knew the system design question, and the coding questions were like five of them, which was kind of wild.”
“I passed the interviews and it was verbally confirmed, but when the process was finished they decided they only want to hire in SF. Even though I was open to moving, they saw some immigration risks that they didn’t want to continue.”
“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.”
“I ended up pitching this quantum ML architecture where we were training models on quantum hardware to do something as stupidly simple as predict whether a number was even or odd, and Harvey’s panel got weirdly fascinated by the remote coding environment I built for physicists.”
“Culturally, they struck me as much more direct about conflict than my current company. The vibe was state your view, defend it with data, then move on. They also wanted every answer tied back to the company's mission of connecting people, even in the cases that seem far away from social products. I got the sense that internal visibility matters a lot there.”
“The internal tooling and the data is incredible. When I was there last year, they had their own Meta AI wired into the most commonly used databases, so I could reference tables and column names and just prompt it to give me the query I needed.”
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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.”
