Real Interview Experiences
Learn what to expect directly from candidates and interviewers who've been through it.
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“What stood out most was the interviewer straight up told me the culture at Scale is “pretty like 996,” which you usually never hear that openly. And the rounds were super speed focused, like two interval-style problems in one hour.”
“In the age of AI, I could feel the interviewer adding little follow-up questions just to make sure I actually understood the problem, because if you were using AI tools, there’d be a lag. Even clearing the onsite doesn’t mean you’ll find a team quickly.”
“I had done really poorly on the easy coding question, but I still got through to the next round, which was really surprising. Then in behavioral, the interviewer said, "that does not sound like a conflict," and I had to change my story on the spot.”
“They literally moved my final to their hackathon and I ended up interviewing at 1:00 a.m. at the office. It was supposed to be collaborative, but instead I got dropped into this huge unfamiliar class and had to understand their code fast.”
“My system design round was literally, “You’re a Netflix subscriber, you forgot your password. Design everything that happens after you click the forgot password button,” including all the behind the scenes flow and edge cases.”
“I said I deep dived on an AI project, and they immediately started asking what parameters I used to train the model and why I switched from one LLM to another. Even the behavioral round got super technical.”
“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.”
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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.”
