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 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 got the vibe they were really looking for ex-founders, because they kept pushing on why my side projects never hit production, and one interview was literally turning a Disney-style dubbing spreadsheet into a slick collaborative product.”
“In the second coding round, he shared a bunch of code for some LLM thing and kept saying, "go through the code, go through the code" whenever I asked for inputs or outputs. I didn’t write a single line, and honestly I was glad when the next round got canceled.”
“At Lovable, what I thought was a recruiter call suddenly became an on the spot TypeScript coding test. He shared his screen, pointed at a bunch of functions, and I had to explain what would happen without even touching the code.”
“Anthropic was very different from the 20 companies I interviewed with. The culture round felt like a lawyer call, very interrogative, with conscience based questions like when have you done something against your values, and after that round I was like, is it still worth it?”
“Funnily enough, I work at Replit, and even for our interviews we have candidates use AI. What you're testing now isn't correctness of code, it's whether someone can reason about the code that gets generated, and OpenAI hadn't really adopted that mindset yet.”
“What I loved about the LangChain thing is they basically plopped me into maybe 500,000 lines of code with no direction, no documentation, and asked me to implement a three-pointer. That's exactly what the job is like.”
“For a functional programming shop, nearly every question I got was best answered in an object-oriented way, and in the deep dive the interviewer literally said he’d much rather hear about a project I had not rehearsed.”
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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.”
