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Reddit VO, offer after 4 rounds Just got an offer from Reddit after a 4 round virtual onsite, figured I'd write up the breakdown since I couldn't find much on this online. Two coding rounds, one was an org hierarchy traversal that ended up being DFS based, the other a tennis scoring state machine that turned into a des...

Is Citadel actually worth the TC bump? Weighing an offer right now. Citadel comp looks like it's 30-40% over standard big tech at the same level, but everything I've heard about the hours sounds brutal tbh. Not totally clear if that's just the trading side or if dev roles get hit too. Anyone here actually made the jump...

Instacart Karat round is genuinely miserable Got through the first two coding rounds fine, decode password and the pivot table thing, both pretty standard leetcode stuff. Then the Karat round happened and it was a mess. Third-party platform, some 10k line bus simulation codebase, and an AI chat agent bolted on that spi...

Bloomberg SWE loop, offer after 5 rounds Just wrapped up the full Bloomberg loop, offer came through so figured I'd share the breakdown since prep info is scattered. Phone screen was on HackerRank, about an hour. Recruiter did a quick resume chat then went straight into two coding problems back to back, they expect you...

Squarepoint loop, OA plus three phone screens, still waiting Wrapped up round three of Squarepoint's process last week so figured I'd write up the whole thing since I couldn't find much detail on their loop before I started. OA was 75 minutes total. Stats and probability section first, t-test versus z-test, spotting bi...

Confluent phone screen, variadic function problem Had my Confluent phone screen earlier this week, want to write it up while it's still fresh. Got the variadic function registry problem, basically building a mini dispatch system where you register function signatures and then match incoming calls against them by argume...

ByteDance rejection after three rounds, still processing it For some background, I've got 4 YOE, currently at a mid size startup, and ByteDance was the first big name company I'd gotten this far with in a while so I was pretty invested emotionally. Applied through a referral back in July and got the phone screen schedu...

Waymo data fluency round wrecked me Had my full Waymo loop last week and it did not go how I expected, wanted to share since online prep really did not prepare me for the last round. Phone screen was a chess board shortest path problem, had to pick between BFS and DFS then handle a blocked cell follow up. Went fine hon...

MAI loop where the HM never showed up Just wrapped up a 4 round Microsoft AI (Copilot team) loop and honestly it left me a little dazed. 5 YOE, came in through a recruiter who barely gave me any context before scheduling. Phone screen was Top K elements, had to sort by score with a distance tie breaker. Felt okay about...

DoorDash phone screen, rejected Rejected after the DoorDash phone screen. No feedback, no surprise there tbh.

xAI interview, rejected the next morning Heard so much about xAI's whole vibe before going in, fast recruiter turnaround then an interview that felt like an afterthought. Turned out to be pretty much exactly that. Recruiter reached out on LinkedIn, 15 minute call, asked about my last two years of work and whether I'd b...

Uber TC vs the actual grind, is it worth it Been seeing a lot of Uber offers floating around lately. Comp isn't bad for the level, but the OA plus VO grind is longer than most FAANG loops at this point. Multiple rounds, multiple weeks, then radio silence half the time after. Feels like the pay premium doesn't match the...

Expedia phone screen, sliding window problem Sharing quick notes since Expedia doesn't get talked about much here. Phone screen was 45 minutes, one coding question, sliding window medium, similar difficulty to the Nice Subarrays style problems. Interviewer let me talk through brute force first then optimize, no real cu...

Anthropic phone screen, rejected Anthropic phone screen. CodeSignal but it opens as a Jupyter notebook, no autocomplete, that threw me off a bit tbh. Got File Dedupe, dedupe by size plus content hash. No helper code this time, had to write the file system methods myself. Google allowed but it ate up time I didn't have....

Affirm virtual onsite, offer after 5 rounds Passed Affirm's loop recently and figured I'd share the details since there isn't much prep material out there for this company specifically. Phone screen was 60 minutes on CoderPad, full screen share required. Got the Live Fraud Detector problem, two parts. Part 1 was debugg...