I interviewed with TikTok in January 2022.

The recruiter reached out, and I was able to quickly set up a coding interview.

The interviewer asked about my experience and had a lot of follow-up questions. Then, we moved to a medium-difficulty question. I solved it using a brute-force approach rather quickly and started talking about optimization and coding further. The interviewer stopped me and literally said, "That's not important; let's talk about your experience some more."

Towards the end, when it was my turn to ask questions, I asked the interviewer about TikTok's growth. That triggered a 15-minute rant about scaling problems and poor tooling. Yikes.

I got a rejection two days later. Chaos.

I signed an NDA, but it was medium LC.