We built a crowdsourced interview question database for tech interviews
81 comments
·March 10, 2025INTPenis
pc86
I struggled early in my career with interviews. Granted this was 2008-2010 era so the job market was not great, especially in a not-quite-urban non-coastal city where I was for a junior developer.
But something did change when I stopped treating interviews as "convince them to like me" / "convince them to hire me" and started treating them as "find out if I want to work (in order) 1) at this company, 2) on this project, 3) with/for this person." I'm sure part of it is just experience, knowing more of the technical stuff, sure, but when you're approaching it honestly as determining whether you give a shit about the person sitting across from you or the glorified Excel spreadsheet you'll be working on it is a lot easier.
It's a big part of why I hate leetcode interviews and consider them a huge red flag especially for non-Tier 1 companies. If your 90 minute interview is 80 minutes of me reversing trees and writing maze solvers then letting me ask 2 questions while you check your email and Slack on your other monitor I am not learning anything from the process and am extremely uninterested in working for you.
scrapcode
I've had two "Online Assessments," as they're called, in the past couple of weeks and they're even weirder than that now. The request access to my desktop, webcam, microphone, akin to a proctored exam. They don't let you use your own editor, or even leave the window. There is no one there to interact with, ask clarifying questions, etc. It then plays everything back with keystrokes sync'd to video/audio for the reviewer.
If I have to go through that bullshit, I would at least like the opportunity to use it to show how I think, ask clarifying questions even if it is just to show understanding of edge cases, create some small talk, etc.
moregrist
I think that would be a hard pass for me.
Why would I allow some rando company’s corporate spyware onto my personal computer?
If you’re that worried about me using AI, maybe the interview should be on-site. And maybe it should be relevant to the work I’d be doing, not solving a bunch of leetcode questions.
Or maybe the dystopian future of tech interviews just involves a burner laptop tethered to a burner cell plan.
The future is absolutely flipping fantastic.
mavelikara
What makes those questions ok for Tier-1 companies to ask, in your opinion?
muzani
Tier 1 is default alive and thriving. They don't need the smartest people. They need people who do not screw up. Someone who's willing to spend 3-6 months cramming interview questions is also someone who is unlikely to drop the ball.
Startups are the opposite. They are default dead. If they hire good enough people, they die. They need exceptional, hungry people. The kind of people who abhor busywork. Startups will pull much lower quality on average and paying higher rates drastically increases the odds of death. So their hope is to get lucky on an exceptional junior. They're also more willing to fire fast instead of doing some odd layoff down the line.
Basically Tier 1 will bias towards minimal false positives, and startups will bias towards minimal false negatives. Most companies are somewhere in the middle, default dead in 30 years or so.
Tier 1 also has a huge funnel and they hire lots of people so they need it. A lot of junk gets into the funnel because of the sheer size of it. They need that 1 out of 300, so they just layer enough filters to hit that rate.
Tier 2 companies who need to filter 1 out of 50 should not be adopting Tier 1 practices. Startups probably have like 10 applicants and 6 of them can't do FizzBuzz. But they still need to filter, even if sometimes they end up with 0.
pc86
I don't think it's ok, but the compensation and competition are both so high they can get away with it. A senior dev at Google in Manhattan will make more than a general practice physician in the same area. This is for a job that you can do with zero credentialing, no degree required, for half the hours and none of the liability. The competition is insane.
Me being on my high horse is not going to change Facebook's hiring practices. But if I get asked to interview somewhere local where they may only be interviewing a half dozen people for a role over a few months, and I stop it early because they start throwing out LeetCode hards, that could be a non-trivial signal for them.
rvz
The problems FAANG companies and an exceptional group of frontier AI companies are solving are leagues different to the problems regular startups think they are solving.
So it only makes sense for those Tier-1 companies to be asking questions that are related to the a vast amount of problems they face on a regular basis.
Your startup is not Google.
michaelt
At a tier 1 tech company the work will be ads/tracking on a global scale. You know that before you enter the door, and if you didn’t like it you wouldn’t be interviewing there.
So much less need for time to decide if you’re interested in working there.
zeroq
Salary
swiftcoder
> Maybe I'm naive but I think an interview should be an honest exchange of what you actually know, not what you crammed for before the interview.
All the way back in ~2012, Amazon's own recruiters were recommending candidates cram "Cracking the Code Interview" (to the surprise of the actual interviewers, who didn't want you doing that). This is the way things have been for a long time now.
jollyllama
Maybe it's time to question it. I don't think there's anything wrong with the now traditional whiteboard interview as such, but the notion that the same questions are all just as relevant to disparate teams is highly questionable. Technical questions should be based on the actual codebases or systems, IMO. I would also question the Hogwarts style approach of interviewing the candidate as a generic dev and then sorting them to the right team.
TheBigSalad
I agree but I companies like Meta/Apple/Amazon hire so much that they probably have full time statisticians just to analyze interview process and map that back to performance. So you have to assume this maps to real world success. Even if you are just testing an employee's preparation, maybe that means something.
Etherlord87
The "Big corporation analyzes everything thoroughly and arrives at the most optimal solution" is a ridiculous myth, and I don't think I even need to give examples. Maybe not Apple, but Amazon surely has a lot of embarrassing failures.
Bluescreenbuddy
>Maybe not Apple, but Amazon surely has a lot of embarrassing failures.
Like pushing a total RTO and not having space or desks for employees then having to delay the RTO.
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lesuorac
It's not probably.
The hiring rubric gets items added/dropped based on what portions are statistically significant when compared to post-hire performance reviews.
There's a lot of research in the public about "Structured Interviews".
swiftcoder
When I was an engineer at Amazon, we all just made up our own questions, or passed fun ones around the office. I assume the Bar Raisers probably had an actual rubric, but the rest of us didn't (and we all had interviewing quotas to meet)
wcast
In fact, for me it is pretty hard if not impossible to remain genuine to my ability and personal touch to navigate corporate world having to swallow all those keywords and behave properly in front of interviewers. Thinking that hacking/mastering it is often the single way out.
creativityhurts
Interviewing went from something you had to get a job to a completely different skill and even a business.
AnimalMuppet
It should be. If the interview tests for what you crammed for, it doesn't test for what you'll remember a month onto the job. That's a sub-optimal strategy for the interviewer.
criddell
I occasionally interview people and that wouldn't really bother me. If you can learn something once you'll be able to re-learn it down the road when needed.
I've found myself in that situation helping my kids with their homework. I might not be able to define L'Hôpital's rule off the top of my head, but it only takes a few minutes of reading to reload it into my brain.
windward
Devil's advocate: there exists a corpus of questions solvable with a small number of techniques after a few weeks of decicated study. When someone has the right brain, these questions are the barrier to a 99th percentile income. What does it say about an interviewee that doesn't bother?
AnimalMuppet
That they're unwilling to jump through random arbitrary hoops that are unrelated to their actual work. If a potential employer considers that a negative, what does it say about the employer?
AlotOfReading
It says they lack the social capital to know what these questions are and how to study them. Is the goal to optimize for people with family and friends already in tech that can pass on the "secret" or to maintain the fig leaf illusion of meritocracy?
penguin_booze
Indeed. This has turned into a show about nothing. Recreational and competitive programming sites incentivize candidates for speed and one-upping. With such a group in the candidate set, companies rose up to the challenge of defeating them at their game by picking even harder questions. With the rise of AI, candidates don't even have to know or read the question.
And eye for eye leaves the whole world blind. I don't think there are any winners in this war.
GaryNumanVevo
When you're interviewing junior developers, you have no standard measure, they don't have enough actual experience to speak to. So before a leetcode and CTCI, you'd either have junior developers who went to a good university and were able to get an internship via that network, or they made some great open source contribution or project on the side as a student
zeroq
As a hiring manager or company owner (I wore both hats) I developed a routine during the interview that basically leads to a breaking point.
I want to either drill down your bullet points to find out if you're actually an expert in XYZ as the resume claims, or work with you on a coding problem that's simple to understand yet more complex than leetcode challenges.
I don't expect you to ace, but I want to check if you're honest and willing to admit your limitations - my philosophy is that I hire humans, not compilers, no one knows how everything, and I'd rather have someone who's fast finding correct answers on the internet than someone who had memorized a book.
That's how I like to do it. Its been so long that I don't even remember when I myself was treated this way during an interview.
ericjmorey
You're not filtering on honesty, but desperation. The desperate will lie because of the higher stakes for themselves.
nusl
I dunno. If your immediate response is to lie rather than admit that you don't know something, it increases the probability that this is the person's default response when in such a situation. You don't want that person working for you if you depend on them for critical stuff, like many development or similar positions.
If you've ever worked with someone like this, you'd know that it's frustrating and unpleasant mid-to-long-term. Someone breaks prod and refuses to admit it unless given a commit as evidence and a confrontation rather than owning up and fixing/helping fix it? Pretends to know everything then produces terrible work that sucks more hours out of other devs? Nah.
Admitting fault and lack of knowledge is important, and it's different to ignorance.
If you're desparate, actually know your stuff, and still lie, that's on you IMO. If you don't know your stuff and you lie, you probably wouldn't have made it anyway.
nh23423fefe
That presumes I can't catch people lying to me?
rascal_rabbit
When prepping for tech interviews, my go-to strategy has always been to scout online for any interview questions and insights people have shared. However, this process is incredibly time-consuming. Information is scattered across multiple platforms: Leetcode Discuss, Glassdoor, 1point3acres (IYKYK) and often buried under low-quality or vague posts. Many threads are just people asking for questions rather than sharing them (Leetcode Discuss I'm looking at you), and even when questions are shared, they often lack enough detail to be truly useful. Typically you have to go through a lot of posts before landing on a good one. To solve this, we built interviewdb.io: a crowdsourced database where people can share real interview questions they've encountered. To incentivize contributions, we’ve implemented a points-based system: you earn points by submitting questions and use them to unlock others.
You might ask: Why Not Just Use Leetcode Tagged? We see InterviewDB as a complement to Leetcode Tagged, not a replacement. Here’s why: 1. Many companies are poorly covered on Leetcode Tagged, with little to no data. 2. No context on whether a question appeared in an OA, phone screen, or onsite. 3. Companies often tweak Leetcode questions, making them harder to recognize under pressure. Seeing real-world phrasing helps. 4. Leetcode doesn’t cover system design or company-specific interview formats/processes.
We launched recently and already have ~5,000 users contributing and benefiting. The more people join, the more valuable this will be for everyone. Would love to hear your thoughts and feedback!
nsxwolf
For those who work in the dark matter of the industry, there are no real resources because most places don't even have "question banks". When an interview request pops up on my calendar, I just go out and find a random question - it's totally disposable and unlikely to be used again, and we don't interview enough for someone to compile enough information on us.
None of the places I've interviewed at in the last 5 years are on this list. One of them has a single question reported on Glassdoor and wasn't similar to what I was asked.
kccqzy
Bigger companies do have question banks. Finding a random question at interview time makes it (1) difficult to compare across candidates; (2) makes the interviewer work too hard since the interviewer hasn't first thought about the question and makes the hints given to candidates less useful.
And Google, being the maker of a search engine, was good at detecting leaks of their questions.
madcaptenor
I work for a large company that hires a lot of developers. If you're in the US you've heard of us and there's maybe a one-in-three chance you're our customer. We are not "sexy" though. I have seen question banks circulate occasionally but when it's time to actually interview nobody can ever remember where the question bank is. Usually when I've been on a team that's actively hiring we make up a bank of questions for that particular round of hiring, which helps us in comparing those candidates that are directly competing against each other. But nothing at scale.
kyawzazaw
It's definitely reused again.
And there are definitely question banks. I saw my team go through (the company recommended lists) in a meeting and we selected some questions
nsxwolf
Yes, question banks exist. I'm talking about the company I work for and in fact all the companies I have ever worked for. We did not use question banks.
kyawzazaw
Your claim was most companies though but to be fair, you are more accurate. Most of The big tech companies that are viewed heavily on levels.fyi definitely has question banks.
GuinansEyebrows
> For those who work in the dark matter of the industry
Can you be more specific about what this means?
nsxwolf
Most software engineers work at companies with names the average person wouldn't recognize. Like, some random B2B company in Ohio that manages corporate gift cards, with 100 total employees. Multiply that by a million. These companies may come up on Glassdoor, but there won't be enough posts to get any kind of consistent pattern on how they run their interviews.
burnstek
Every day I thank god I finished my career in software before Leetcode-driven interviewing became so popular.
thih9
Curious, did you retire or move to a different field? If the latter, what are you doing now?
rvz
Yet, these tech interview tests and questions have already been gamed to death by very clever folks like the creator of InterviewCoder: [0] who is now making more than $100K a month out of it.
But do you know what? Good. It is for the best.
This also signals the definitive end of Leetcode, Hackerrank and all the other useless online assessment tools. It is now a completely ineffective tool thanks to AI.
It also is an example that fits the Y Combinator definition to find those who are "hacking a system to your advantage" instead of a "computer system".
Whoever built this destroyed the online assessment system with all its participants in it.
If you're still using online assessment tools like Leetcode, it's now time to find a much more rigorous method of interviewing candidates and also bring on-site interviews back.
Fokamul
Do you really need this?
It's usually enough to think as HR/recruiter. Aka open favorite LLM chatbot and let it generate these questions. Because that's what they will do.
travisgriggs
<satire>
Maybe after this “takes off”, they can explore some other domains.
“We built a crowdsourced examiner question database for pilot exams.”
“We built a crowdsourced set of best responses for marginalized peoples who come in contact with hostile police officers.”
So on, so forth.
Then they can franchise it into a set of “exchanges”.
arealaccount
They do actually have crowdsourced databases for pilot exams now that the question bank is not longer published by the FAA
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kube-system
Might want to include a DMCA takedown address, so that you don't get them sent to your upstream provider. I regularly submit takedown requests to other sites when I see my interview questions posted there. I'm sure others do as well.
apical_dendrite
Is an interview question copyrightable?
I am sure that if someone is uploading the specific wording of an interview question, then that would potentially be a copyright violation. But if they're just describing the problem in their own words (for instance "I was asked to design a system for selling movie tickets") then there shouldn't be a copyright issue.
seafoamteal
Not sure what the legal technicalities are, but one of the questions I saw on the site was just a picture of a the user's screen with the question on it, so it's definitely more the former than the latter.
kube-system
Yes, the bar for copyright protection on written text is very low. And I've never not seen them just plainly copy/pasted.
If someone rephrased them I really wouldn't have an issue with that, because the phrasing is fairly important to the particular questions I'm asking. (and the doofuses using these sites probably would miss any nuance when rephrasing them anyway)
blindriver
Blind, Leetcode and Chinese sites like 1point3acres have a ton of interview questions.
cryptozeus
“Technical review by experienced developers Our team of engineers with experience at top tech companies reviews each question for technical accuracy, relevance, and clarity.”
Which engineers which top companies? It’s all very ambitious.
Kinda sad that it has come to this.
Maybe I'm naive but I think an interview should be an honest exchange of what you actually know, not what you crammed for before the interview.