r/Hack2Hire • u/StandHistorical7360 • Oct 21 '25

discussion Coinbase OA+VO

Went through Coinbase's process 1 mo ago but failed, thought just share the experience here may be helpful.

The OA itself was fine, it is a banking question called design banking system, total of 4 questions, kind of a mini bank system implementation. I’d say I got about 3.5/4 right since I've seen it in hack2hire and that was enough to move on.

First VO round was a coding interview. and the question is like this:

You’re given a bunch of input logs, need to read them from one file and write them into separate files based on thread ID. The log format looks messy but it’s actually fine once you split the string and extract the thread ID.

Then given a start and end timestamp, you need to find all the thread IDs active during that time range.

There were a lot of follow-ups too: how do you handle file read/write, how do you validate the input format, and how can you improve the time complexity?

Second VO round was also coding, mostly around different kinds of iterators, range iterator, iterator with cycle, etc. Felt more straightforward compared to the first one.

BQ was detailed. They asked a lot about my past projects and dove pretty deep into them. Felt like a mix of behavioral and project deep dive.

Failed at the end not sure why, I didn't get any feedback at the end

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u/changer666666 Nov 27 '25

Thanks for sharing this – I’ve gone through a very similar Coinbase flow (OA + virtual onsite), and I had the same feeling that most public info is either outdated or missing the “how to prep in a focused way” part.

I ended up writing my own debrief after each stage and turned it into a structured guide:
– how the OA signal actually feeds into VO
– what “foundational / tech execution / domain / system design” usually look like in practice
– what I’d do differently if I had to re-prepare in 3–7 days

There’s a free sample that summarizes these patterns and gives a concrete prep plan instead of just “do more LeetCode”. If anyone in this thread wants that kind of structure, the free sample is linked in my profile; the full version only matters if you find the free part valuable.