Real Interview Experiences
Learn what to expect directly from candidates and interviewers who've been through it.
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“Rehearsing your take-home top-down isn't actually that helpful. There were so many curveballs thrown in the middle of the jam session that it would be almost impossible to just read a script and go slide to slide — you need to be on the tip of your toes.”
“I walked into this thing with 48 pages of prep, and that still barely felt like enough because at Amazon the first question is maybe 20% of the interview and the other 80% is them asking, 'How do you know that? Prove it.'”
“Google told me each round mapped to a specific rubric, but in reality the interviewers just asked whatever they wanted, and my so-called Googliness and execution round turned into Google Photos design plus a geospatial strategy curveball.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I basically felt like a guinea pig because Meta had just rolled out the AI PM round, and after I vibe coded a volunteering app in Llama the interviewer started grilling me on token usage, latency, and retrieval.”
“The hardest part wasn't coming up with a flashy AI idea. It was defending what I would actually ship right now when the model still messes up, especially for actions where one bad miss can permanently destroy trust.”
“They were trying to team match me to a Gemini role before the loop, and then in strategy it got almost combative. Every idea was, 'Slack can do that too, so how are you going to compete with free?'”
“What surprised me is how open ended the questions are, but each interviewer is very likely probing a specific Amazon leadership principle, so generic answers actually hurt you because you need to tease out what they’re really testing.”
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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.”
