Real Interview Experiences
Learn what to expect directly from candidates and interviewers who've been through it.
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“I went into the hiring manager round thinking it would be another chill recruiter-style conversation, and instead I got hit with system design, language tradeoffs, and object-oriented follow-ups. That was easily the most surprising part of the whole loop.”
“When I went on-site in Palo Alto, they had security guards with guns at the entrance, were doing bag checks, and I even needed an escort to the bathroom. It honestly felt like TSA before an interview.”
“They basically gave me access to part of their codebase and were like, "Figure it out, see anything you want to build, and just build it." For eight hours I worked out of a Slack group, then presented the feature at the end of the day.”
“I was on the plane back to Europe when they texted, “Company policy changed, you have to pass an on site coding round,” and then they rescheduled the midnight hiring manager call twice until it was like 3:00 a.m. for me.”
“I think I was one of the first people to take Meta’s AI round, and the models I had were really bad, like ChatGPT mini. I tried asking for test cases and it would just spit out something completely wrong.”
“The so-called system design round totally threw me off. He was like, "let's code it out," and wanted me to build a file system with four use cases in 45 minutes, and then the recruiter just ghosted me for a month.”
“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.”
“I went in expecting a multithreaded DSA question, and instead they dropped me into a full project with image files where I had to Google a library on the spot. End of the day, I did not even have one image converted.”
“What stood out about Nvidia was how low level they went. I got the sense they don’t want you using a lot of these high level library functions, and implementing an entire transformer from scratch was honestly what helped me most.”
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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.”
