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Software Engineer Interview Experience

April 1, 2025
Negative ExperienceNo Offer

Process

The first hour-long interview is two LeetCode questions, a medium followed by a hard. The recruiter will tell you it's not LeetCode, but it is.

The person who interviewed me in the first round was disengaged. I had not seen the problem before, so I calmly suggested potential solutions with the expectation that we would bounce ideas back and forth. However, he completely shut me down, telling me that if I thought I had a solution, I should just start coding it up. I would try my best to explain the thought process behind my algorithm, but he verbatim told me that "I have no idea what this is doing" and just told me to run test cases. We finally reached the solution to the first question after I debugged in silence since the interviewer wasn't really doing anything but staring at my code.

On the second question, a LeetCode hard, another question I had never seen before, I again sat in silence as he told me to code up what I thought was the solution (after attempting to bounce ideas back and forth again). We reached the end of the interview without a complete solution, and he asked me vague questions and condescendingly told me that this was not the way to do it. Very negative experience.

The second interview was more reflective of what you might do on the job as a front-end engineer, but the negative impression from the first interview kept me under pressure and I blundered some basic rendering concepts. The fact that they do two 1-hour screens before the onsite is also definitely a waste of time.

Questions

It's an array question on leetcode.

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Interview Statistics

The following metrics were computed from 22 interview experiences for the Retool Software Engineer role.

Success Rate

27%
Pass Rate

Retool's interview process for their Software Engineer roles is very selective, failing most engineers who go through it.

Experience Rating

Positive59%
Neutral14%
Negative27%

Candidates reported having very good feelings for Retool's Software Engineer interview process.