Real Interview Experiences
Learn what to expect directly from candidates and interviewers who've been through it.
- 1,323 experiences
- 313 companies
- 37 roles
- +204 added this month
GoogleSenior Software Engineer · L5“It was basically the most by-the-book Google loop possible: shortest path in a DAG, minimum meeting rooms, then a news feed design where they kept pushing on fanout, storage, and ranking.”
GoogleStaff Software Engineer · L6“The system design wasn’t generic. It was built around the team’s actual work: an AI agent that lets enterprise users search and query their data and documents.”
GoogleProduct Manager · L4“It wasn’t about flashy ideas. They wanted to see whether your basic product sense holds up when they push on it.”
GoogleProduct Manager · L5“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.”
GoogleEngineering Manager (L6) · L6“I got all the way to the end for an L6 EM role, and the must-pass round was a 200-plus-line code review in a Google Doc where I had to manually debug broken interval logic with no IDE and no tools.”
GoogleSoftware Engineer (L4) · L4“My strongest Google round was with a senior interviewer who never opened a LeetCode prompt. He just asked what I knew about algorithms, pushed me into distributed merge sort from first principles, and apparently got more signal from that than a standard coding screen.”
GoogleTechnical Program Manager (L5) · L5“I’d been applying to Google for five years, like 50 to 100 times, with and without referrals, and this one just randomly responded. Honestly, I think for TPM it’s a chance thing, so sometimes you just get yourself in the door through PGM and switch later.”
GoogleNew Grad Software Engineer (L3) · L3“One of my onsite interviewers pasted a prompt that was basically one sentence long and then just sat back. That round made it click for me that Google was testing how I clarified and structured the problem, not whether I could speedrun a DSA coding problem.”
GoogleSenior Product Manager · L5“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?'”
GoogleAI Engineer Intern · Intern“It was an internship role, AI engineer. First was an online coding round on arrays and strings where I had to return a palindromic subsequence, and later they asked dynamic programming and a linked list hard question.”
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AnthropicSoftware Engineer, Safeguards · L5“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.”
NetflixEngineering Manager, Tooling“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.”
