Structured
Same shape every time
Round-by-round, not a diary. You can scan five of them in five minutes and see the pattern.
Interview experiences
What the loop actually felt like
Full write-ups from real interviews — round by round, what was asked, what caught people off guard, and what they’d do differently. The context a question list can never give you.
Opening soon
Share yours, read everyone else’s
Every write-up will follow the same structure, so they’re comparable rather than a wall of stories: company type and role, how many rounds, what each round covered, difficulty, surprises, outcome, and one thing they’d do differently.
Honest
Rejections too
The ones that didn’t work out teach more than the wins. No survivorship bias here.
Safe
Anonymous by default
No names, no identifying details unless you explicitly want them. Nothing that could reach an employer.
Before you write oneDon’t break an NDA and don’t post confidential technical detail. Describe the shape of the round and the kind of question — that’s what helps the next person, and it keeps you safe.
I’ll send the template — takes about ten minutes to fill in.
Format preview · illustrative entry, not a real submission
Every write-up follows this structure, so you can scan five of them in five minutes and see the pattern instead of reading five diaries.
EV manufacturer — Design Engineer II
Round 1Recruiter, 30 min. Resume walk and one surprise: “what’s the tightest tolerance you’ve ever specified and why?” Have a number ready.
Round 2Technical, 60 min. Fundamentals rapid-fire, then a bolt sizing calc on a shared whiteboard. They cared more about my assumptions than the arithmetic.
Round 3Live design: “design a mount for this sensor.” Sketched for 20 min, then 25 min of DFM and tolerance questions on my own sketch.
Round 4Panel with manufacturing and quality. Cost and line-rate pushback throughout. Felt adversarial; apparently that’s normal there.
Hardest partDefending my own sketch under pressure. Knowing the theory wasn’t the problem — explaining a decision I’d made 90 seconds earlier was.
What surprised meZero questions about software or FEA. All hand calcs and manufacturing judgement.
What I’d do differentlyPractise sketching out loud. I’d never once explained a design while drawing it, and it showed in round 3.