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
StripeEngineering Manager · L6“What stuck with me was how fast it got into management judgment, like straight up asking if I'd actually managed a low performer and what makes someone staff in my eyes.”
AnthropicEngineering Manager, Data Infrastructure“I prepped for a normal EM system design, and then they put half an Anthropic inference design on the screen and asked me to tear it apart. That was when I realized they cared way more about design judgment and team guidance than whiteboard theatrics.”
AppleEngineering Manager (M1/M2)“The wildest round was not system design. It was a cross-org interview with a cost management partner grilling me on how I would forecast host spend for an observability team, and I had not seen that anywhere else.”
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.”
MetaEngineering Manager (M1)“Not all interviewers may be able to adequately ask the right questions to go in depth, but they are absolutely looking for you to provide that depth by yourself. Your examples should not be surface level, but show you actually lived through the situation.”
MetaEngineering Manager“I was really confident of getting an offer, but they told me I scored higher on the management side and failed coding and product design. What surprised me most was hearing the product design feedback was structured so the recruiter couldn't really challenge it.”
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.”
MetaSecurity Engineering Manager (M1)“I was a little complacent because I’m already ex-Meta, and the surprising feedback was that my project retrospective was only leaning toward hire because I answered a constructive feedback question like they were asking for praise. I cleared the loop, discussed numbers and joining date, and then the offer got put on hold because of the hiring freeze.”
MicrosoftEngineering Manager“The process was okay. Very haphazard and not very structured. Initially i was told that i will interview with an engineer then the VP took my loop. ”
CrusoeEngineering Manager · L5“The interview went well overall, but I wish we had spent more time discussing technical topics in depth rather than just covering them at a high level.”
