Real Interview Experiences
Learn what to expect directly from candidates and interviewers who've been through it.
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“The interview process was well-structured and focused on both coding and system/infrastructure knowledge. The interviewers were professional and gave me enough time to explain my thought process. I was ultimately rejected because my coding experience, particularly with data structures and algorithms, was not strong enough. In hindsight, I could have communicated my approach more clearly and solved the coding problems more efficiently. Compared to other interviews I've done, this one placed a stronger emphasis on coding fundamentals while also evaluating infrastructure concepts.”
“Too much bureaucratic process. Be prepared for ghosting. They expedite after onsites. Negotiation can take few rounds. Be patient, they do not throw away strong candidates.”
“This was my first interview ever, and I was nervous. However, the introduction went really well and caught the interviewer’s attention. At the start, I mentioned that my areas of interest were "geopolitics" and "music production". Since many people these days enjoy discussing geopolitics, he followed up by saying he was interested in it too and asked me about recent events I knew about. For the first 10 minutes, we talked about geopolitics, and It was a memorable first 10 minutes in my very first interview. Then we got back to him asking me technical questions. I think i had a good first impression. He first stated with asking general programming questions, about Object oriented programming, Polymorphism. I was good here. Then we got on topic of Database. Here i fumbled big time. First question "what is database?" My nerves answer: a place where we store data. I felt it me fumbling, i was nerves and never practice about database, SQL for this interview. Then here we go another fumble, He asked "What are operators in SQL?" I brain-fogged and said am not aware of this answer, i knew but in moment i did not understand the meaning of "operators", they he clarifies saying addition, subtraction. And it clicked in my mind, but still my answer was in 2 lines: "Plus, minus, subtraction, division, Arithmetic, Logical, Comparison" thats it. I should have expanded on it and explained in little more detail. I think i did this because it was my first interview and in my mind going through was i fumbled very bad and am not gonna be selected i lost my all hopes in between the interview. till now its been in total 20-25 minutes, we switched to last part which was coding part. He said he asked this question to last guy and he did not able to answer this question. I was confident on my problem solving and coding skills, but yeh as you could tell by now i suck at communication. The coding question was: "Given a array on integers return a frequency of each element". I though this is pretty easy and first explain him my first approach to problem, start implementing, code ran and passed on first run. Explain him what approach i used and why everything in detail, with time and space complexities. So the two best parts were long intro and last coding problem. I also asked him at the end what I could improve on, and he mentioned my theoretical knowledge. He explained that interviewers don’t expect you to recite textbook definitions word‑for‑word, but they do expect you to understand and be able to talk about the main ideas or high‑level concepts behind each topic. I somewhere knew that am not getting selected, and i was right.”
“The process was straightforward. It is a technical interview along with experimentation trade-offs. ”
“Started off with recruiter screening with light technical questions, and walked me through all the rounds. Next, I had several rounds. Very light coding, mostly case studies and stats knowledge. Very theory/application focused.”
“The process was smooth, and the HR team was friendly. During the behavioral interview, the interviewer asked me two main questions and then followed up with additional questions based on my answers.”
“The process was very straightforward. The recruiters are very good. Most of the questions you can find online for coding and they are relatively easy. For the design round, if you practice the ranking questions well, it should cover most of the questions”
“Mostly behavioral. One round with Hiring manager, and another round with peer level team managers. Interviewers were required to take notes in a STAR format.”
“It was a straightforward interview process. I was contacted by the recruiter, had hiring manager, skip level / team screen and then an onsite meeting with cross functional team members. I didn't appreciate that there was miscommunication with the recruiter on which of the two roles that were open that I was interviewing for, and that ultimately cost me an offer because I prepared a deck for the wrong role. ”
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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.”
