Real Interview Experiences
Learn what to expect directly from candidates and interviewers who've been through it.
Interviewed recently? Share your experience to try it free, or become a member for full access.
“In my binary tree round, I was not even leaning on BFS or DFS terminology, and they still liked my solution because I kept reasoning it out. That was the moment where Microsoft felt more about logical thinking than memorized interview patterns.”
“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.”
“When they wrote that one column depends on another, I pretty much immediately jumped to cycle detection and modeled it as a graph. There was a lot of reading involved, but the solutions themselves were mostly brute force and straightforward.”
“The process wasn’t as long as I expected. My onsite was supposed to be four rounds, but they cut it to just two, and one of them was a time-based key value store with delete at a specific timestamp given in the full spec up front.”
“When I went through Databricks, it honestly felt like a Palantir-style FDE loop had been transplanted over. The decomp round was so vague that if I skipped stakeholder questions and KPIs and jumped into architecture, I would have been dead.”
“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.”
“I went in expecting the usual behavioral-first format, but in my loop they flipped it and opened with the coding question. The behavioral part still mattered, they just used the follow-ups to see if I actually knew my own work in detail.”
“There’s a new AI coding section I haven’t seen before. They still want to test my coding skill, so I first implement by myself, then use AI as a code reviewer for readability and missing test cases.”
“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.”
