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Just finished VO Stage 1 for Instacart last week. 4 YOE, currently at a Series B startup, decided to start testing the waters with bigger companies this cycle. First two coding rounds honestly felt like I had prepared for the exact right stuff. Decode password came up almost verbatim from 地里, and the second round was t...

HRT phone screen, got cooked by a problem I couldn't finish (Rejected) Just finished HRT algo dev phone screen. One coding problem, 45 minutes, interviewer read it out loud so I'm scribbling notes while he talks. It's a 1D simulation thing with players and a watcher that reverses direction. Sounds manageable. It is not...

Waymo VO got blindsided by the data fluency round (Rejected) Been at my current company for 3 years and finally decided to start exploring. Waymo was on my list because I've always been curious about AV and the problems felt genuinely interesting, actual hard engineering stuff rather than another CRUD app. Phone screen...

Got the sliding window question (max unique users in a window). Solved it, he asked one follow-up. Rejected 3 days later. back to grinding I guess.

Expedia VO coding round was actually tricky Sharing for anyone prepping. Had VO last week, 3 rounds total. Coding: opened with a quick Expedia values BQ, then got Restore String with Target Digit Sum. It's a backtracking/DFS problem with digit placeholders. I worked through it but got stuck on a subtle ed...

Capital One OA - Pending, sharing questions for future prep Just finished the C1 CodeSignal OA and wanted to share the problem set while it's fresh. 70 minutes, 4 questions, camera/mic/screen share required. Also had to upload my driver's license before starting, which was a bit annoying. Q1: Symmetric triplet count. G...

xAI phone screen - what they actually ask Got reached out to by an xAI recruiter on LinkedIn. Scheduled a 15-min tech screen with a team lead. He was 5 min late and opened with a project deep-dive: walk me through your most technically challenging work from the last 2 years. Heavy follow-ups on what I personally owned...

So I just got off the phone with the recruiter and it's a no. Kinda gutted tbh because I genuinely thought I did well. Some background: 3 YOE, currently at a mid-size fintech doing backend work. Had been low-key preparing for a few months and Snowflake felt like a solid step up. Applied through a referral from a friend...

Ramp onsite - Rejected and still don't know what signal they were looking for Got the rejection email 3 days after onsite. No feedback, obviously. Posting this because I'm genuinely baffled and a little pissed. Background: 4 YOE, was actively recruiting and Ramp was near the top of my list. Fintech with real traction,...

Expedia VO - Rejected after 3 weeks of silence Had my VO at Expedia last month for a mid-level SDE role. Phone screen was a sliding window problem, honestly suspiciously easy 🤨. Onsite was 3 rounds: house robber DP variant, natural disaster notification system design, and a BQ with the "tell me a time you didn't trust...

Got an offer from DBX last week and I've been going back and forth on it. 6 YOE, currently at a large FAANG adjacent company. Wanted to put my thinking somewhere and see if anyone has been in a similar spot. The base is solid and TC is competitive, but the equity piece is where it gets complicated. DBX is still private...

Squarepoint onsite done, waiting to hear back (Pending) OA: stats section was suspiciously easy 🤨, got through it fast. Second coding problem was some DP thing I barely scraped together. Phone screens (3 rounds): Round 1: decorators, context managers, live KV store implementation Round 2: generators + JSON stats proce...

should I even bother targeting HRT next cycle heard from someone at my school that HRT basically wrapped their whole summer intern pipeline already, and they're not doing another push til fall. kinda rough timing if you're counting on that path. anyone know if they're still doing new grad direct hires or is that also f...

Just finished the HRT Algo Dev phone screen. Wanted to share for anyone prepping. They gave me a simulation problem: 1D array, N players moving right at 1 unit/time, watcher starts at some position and reverses direction at given timestamps. Goal was to count how many players reach position L by end time T. Problem was...

Cleared coding and SD no problem, then bombed the culture round. Gave what I thought was a genuine answer about AI safety and it wasn't specific enough apparently. Back to grinding I guess.