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.”
“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.”
“Not all interviewers may be able to adequately ask the right questions to go in depth, but they are absolutely looking for you to provide that depth by yourself. Your examples should not be surface level, but show you actually lived through the situation.”
“The most awkward part was they kept questioning my ability to analyze data, and I had actually initiated and been a big part of the migration from Microsoft to analyze data, so it felt really strange.”
“The interview is definitely hard, but achievable with preparation because the timing is very less. In the screening, you get five Python and five SQL in one hour, and you need to pass at least three SQL and three Python.”
“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.”
“I had to lead an enablement session for a thousand Adobe engineers, so I built a fake Adobe codebase, demoed Cursor live, and got pushback like, "usage is up, but PRs are going down, what do you do?"”
“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.”
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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.”
