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OpenAI rejection Result: Rejected Number of Rounds: 5 Got the rejection after full loop. Phone screen and 5 onsites, recruiter gave no real feedback. Thought the SD went ok but clearly not. Oh well.

My Databricks loop Result: Rejected Number of Rounds: 6 7 YOE, currently at mid-stage startup. Heard DBX was actively hiring so threw my hat in. Phone screen was CIDR block IP matching. Networking stuff I hadn't touched in a while, had to think through the binary prefix logic. Felt ok but not great. VO was 5 rounds: tw...

Squarepoint Capital - Interview Experience - Software Engineer Result: Offer Number of Rounds: 5 OA was 75 minutes: 4 stats/probability questions first (t-test vs z-test, time complexity analysis, basic probability), then 2 coding problems. First coding was heap-based. Second was a hard DP problem I barely got through....

Robinhood - Interview Experience - Software Engineer Result: Rejected Number of Rounds: 3 Phone screen: leaderboard + heap. Passed. Onsite: dependency graph + project deep dive. Deep dive went badly. 45 minutes of follow-ups and I ran dry on examples around 20 minutes in. Rejected.

Oracle interviews are still a thing? Got a recruiter reach out for Oracle. Hadn't thought about them in 3 years. Comp is mid, tech is legacy, interview is standard LC. Passing. Genuinely surprised these are still happening.

Amazon - Company Culture - Software Engineer Time at Company: 2 years Let me be honest about what working at Amazon is actually like. The frugality culture is real. You fight for every dollar of budget, every hire, every resource. That's dressed up as "ownership" but it mostly means dealing with chronic under-resourcin...

Affirm - Interview Experience - Software Engineer Result: Offer Number of Rounds: 5 Phone screen was suspiciously easy 🤨. Domain-specific coding with 100+ lines of starter code, fintech context. Reading the starter code took 10 minutes. The actual coding was manageable. Wasn't sure if it was a warmup or a trap. Onsite...

Snowflake - Interview Experience - Software Engineer Result: Rejected Number of Rounds: 5 Two separate phone screens before the onsite. First was the closest cake problem: 2D grid, find minimum distance from each person to a cake. Multi-source BFS from all cake positions. Passed. Second was walls and gates variant: dis...

Is Databricks still worth it or has the hype peaked? Asking because I have an offer and keep getting mixed signals. Strong TC, interesting data infra work, but the interview felt suspicious. The question bank is small enough that I don't think the interviewers themselves could solve the questions otherwise. That's eith...

Google - Company Culture - Software Engineer Time at Company: 14 months Joined Google for the obvious reasons. Comp, brand, stability. What I didn't expect is how much of the work is about being seen rather than building things. Projects get picked for career visibility. Nobody owns anything end-to-end. There are 5 eng...

Capital One - Interview Experience - Software Engineer Result: Offer Number of Rounds: 2 OA first: 4 questions in 70 minutes on CodeSignal. Q1 and Q2 were straightforward string/array problems. Q3 was string manipulation with edge cases. Q4 was a simulation, tight time limit. Hit Q4 with O(n²) which the problem explici...

Anthropic - Company Culture - Software Engineer Time at Company: 7 months Took the job for the mission. Seven months in, the mission is real. The work is meaningful and people genuinely believe in what they're building. What they don't advertise is the constant performance pressure dressed up as purpose. Everyone here...

Confluent - Interview Experience - Software Engineer Result: Offer Number of Rounds: 4 Phone screen was the variadic function library problem. Design a registry for function overloads, match signatures by argument types. Follow-ups on optional args and variadic flag. Felt manageable. Onsite had 4 rounds. First coding w...

Amazon - Career Growth - Software Engineer Level: SDE2 YOE at Amazon: 3 years Three years as SDE2. First promo attempt was rejected because the project got cancelled mid-cycle in a reorg. Second attempt, manager changed. New manager didn't know my work well enough to write the promo doc properly. Third attempt now. I'v...

Airbnb - Interview Experience - Software Engineer Result: Offer Number of Rounds: 5 Spent a month prepping specifically for Airbnb and it paid off. Sharing the full breakdown. Phone screen was the bank account management system. Implement deposit, withdraw, transaction history, and balance. Sounds basic but they want t...