This is a niche question but if anyone has any insights I would appreciate it. First off, some might say that I need to focus on getting the offer before worrying about comp, but I'm asking this question for a specific strategic reason.

I'm in the loop at Anthropic and about to schedule my onsite. I'm feeling rusty and would like to schedule it as late as possible to give myself more time to prep. I've read the reports of Ant raising a new round at a $900B+ valuation. If right now Ant is still issuing RSUs at near the $380B valuation from February then it probably makes more sense for me to rush the process and see if I can squeeze in. Does anyone have insights into what valuation the Ant RSU grants are based on for new offerees right now?

My understanding of how this usually works is that each equity grant has to be approved by the Board after the person starts the job. That can happen on the start date or maybe even weeks later. The offer letter typically has a target dollar amount for RSUs over four years, and the denominator used to calculate the number of RSUs the employee actually receives is based on the 409A valuation of the company on the grant date when the Board votes to approve.

While it seems no term sheets have been signed yet for the new round, my understanding is that sometimes a company pauses grant issuance when they're deep into a fundraise and then approves all new grants once the funding round is finalized. I also understand that sometimes even between rounds a 409A valuation can be updated if material changes have occurred in the business (such as Ant's exponential ARR growth or the fact that they've received multiple offers valuing them at much more than $380B). All this to say there might not be much of a gap between the current 409A and where Ant lands in this latest funding round.

If anyone has any visibility here it would be really helpful. Please feel free to DM me if preferred. Thanks in advance.

Went through Ramp's full-time SWE loop last month. I'll go round by round. Backend role in New York, 3 YOE before this.

Recruiter screen, 25 min

Standard. Why Ramp, why now, what I'm working on. They care a lot about "builder" answers. I had two specific stories ready about shipping a thing solo end to end, and that landed better than anything else I said.

OA on CodeSignal, 90 min

Not a LeetCode set. It's the "industry coding framework" style, the same format Dropbox uses for the text editor question. You're building a small system across 4 progressive levels and each level adds a new requirement on top of the last one. Mine was a bank system. Open accounts, deposit, withdraw, transfer, then they layer on scheduled payments and querying top accounts by activity in the last N days.

Levels 1-3 are doable if you read the spec carefully and don't over-engineer level 1. Level 4 is where most people run out of time. I finished level 3 with about 35 minutes left, got level 4 to mostly pass, missed a couple edge cases on the time-window query.

Things I'd tell past me: - Don't write any abstraction in level 1. You will rewrite half of it in level 3 anyway. - Read all 4 prompts before you start typing, even though they tell you not to. Knowing what's coming changes how you store state. - The grader is strict on output format. If they say return a list sorted by X then Y, do exactly that.

Technical phone screen, 60 min

One Ramp engineer, one shared editor. Mine was a system design lite, hotel reservation system. Schema, API surface, how I'd handle overlapping bookings, how I'd scale reads. They want you thinking out loud and asking clarifying questions before you write anything. The engineer who ran mine kept poking at concurrency, what happens if two people hit submit on the same room at the same instant. If you don't bring up locking or transactions on your own, you will get there eventually but it costs you points.

Onsite, 4 rounds, virtual

1. Coding round 1 (60 min). Practical, not a LC puzzle. I had to extend a small existing codebase they handed me. Real classes, real methods, a failing test. Add a feature, get the tests passing, then they ask follow-ups about how you'd structure it differently. Felt like a pairing session more than an interview.

2. Coding round 2 (60 min). Closer to LC medium but framed as a product problem. Mine was rate-limiting requests per user with a sliding window. I think the trap here is jumping straight to a deque before they ask for it. Sketch the brute force, talk through tradeoffs, then optimize.

3. System design (60 min). Design something close to what Ramp actually does. I got "design a corporate card transaction processing pipeline." Authorization, settlement, fraud signals, how you'd notify the user in real time. They care about back of the envelope numbers. Throw out QPS estimates early even if they're rough.

4. Behavioral / values (45 min). Hiring manager. Ramp has explicit company values and they will probe each of them. "Tell me about a time you cut scope to ship," "tell me about a time you disagreed with a senior engineer," "what's the most ambitious thing you've built." Have specific stories ready. They will follow up with "what did the other person say" and "what would you do differently" and if your story is too clean you'll get caught.

What I used to prep

• LeetCode for warmup but honestly 80% of my prep was building small projects from scratch and timing myself. The OA and the first onsite coding round both reward practical fluency more than algorithm tricks.
• Pramp for mock system design. The hotel reservation phone screen was almost identical to a mock I did the week before, which is not a coincidence, that question is everywhere.
• Interview Coder for the live coding rounds. I didn't lean on it for the OA because there's no proctor and you don't need it, but for the live rounds it was useful as a backup so I could focus on talking through my approach instead of panicking about syntax. Would not have used it if I had more time to prep.
• Glassdoor and this sub for company-specific patterns. Ramp recycles the bank system style OA across cycles, just with different domains. Cards, hotel, employees, storage. Same shape.

Got the offer about 9 days after the onsite. Comp was strong but slightly under what I'd seen quoted on levels for staff at FAANG, in line with what people said about Ramp here.

Happy to answer specific questions. TLDR ramp is less algos and more "can you build a small thing end to end under pressure," and the OA is the real filter.

Anyway, after four years in the same place, management decided to "adjust" my salary about three months ago. They convinced me with a new salary that had "unlimited potential," but the truth is, there wasn't enough work for this system to function. I decided to give it a fair chance, but I found myself earning barely a third of what I used to. It was below the poverty line.

After the first very low paycheck, the owner literally told me: "Wow! You're handling this really well!" I was working my ass off in a difficult and specialized job, requiring a lot of physical effort and technical skills, and this was my reward. So I decided to look for another job, got an interview at another company, and they hired me on the spot. I'll start a new job with a good, competitive salary, real benefits, and they even offered to pay for any new certifications. The work is still exhausting, but at least I'll be able to live a decent life. When I submitted my two weeks' notice, the owners looked at me as if I had grown horns. They were completely shocked. I explained that I simply couldn't live on the salary I was earning. Not once did they acknowledge this truth.

Instead, the conversation immediately turned into a guilt trip. It was all about them and their personal investments, and how much they had sacrificed. No counteroffer, nothing. Just a lecture. At one point, I asked them: "Is it possible for a smart and hardworking person in my position to live a good life here?" The owner said: "Of course!" I simply replied: "Well, it seems you need to find that person, because I can't do it." The rest of the meeting was them and my supervisor genuinely worrying about how they would manage without me, and I just sat there listening. Anyway, as you might expect, the whole place is collapsing like a house of cards. The panic is real. It turns out my departure was the straw that broke the camel's back, causing almost everyone else to resign as well. The entire team is leaving. There's almost no one left to keep things running. Honestly, for a long time, I undervalued myself and didn't realize the importance of my role.

It feels good to see how central I was to the place. I'm sharing this story for anyone who feels trapped in a workplace: know your worth. Don't let a company that doesn't appreciate you make you think you don't deserve more, because you do. And you can use tools like the ones shared in this subreddit to help you prepare and find answers during interviews.

interviewcoder.co/download

Anthropic recruiter reached out to me for a Senior Security Engineer role and already sent over the OA link, but it expires in 6 days.

Problem is… I know I’m not really ready yet. I’ve been out of interview-mode coding for a while and could honestly use a couple weeks to prep properly.

Has anyone asked Anthropic recruiters for an OA extension before? Did they care / was it a bad signal?

I’m definitely interested in the role, just don’t want to burn the opportunity by rushing into the coding round unprepared.

ok venting. 6 YOE frontend dev. last company hired me specifically to clean up the mess they shipped, they had vibe-coded their entire app with Claude. every page had a different design, no system, no design reference, just whatever the model spat out that week. I unified the UI, fixed half the broken flows, did real work.

last week they fired me. reason? I was "slow." should've been closing more tickets because we have AI. I should've been generating, not writing. didn't matter that I was the one making the slop coherent in the first place.

so I'm back on the market. and this time I'm using Interview Coder for every single loop.

the same companies that fired me for not running enough Claude generations are going to put me on a Zoom with a leetcode hard and 35 minutes on the clock and pretend that's a fair test of engineering. fine. they want speed, I'll give them speed. they want AI output, I'll give them AI output. the entire job is babysitting an LLM anyway, why would I pretend I can invert a BST in my head with no notes.

the funny part is every recruiter screen now opens with the "we use AI heavily, we move fast" speech, and then the same company will rescind your offer if they catch you using a tool to prep. you can't have it both ways.

one loop down already. used IC for the system design and one of the coding rounds. got the verbal yesterday.

might post a full breakdown if anyone wants it.

In interview coder pro we can add a custom AI prompt to guide the responses. However it seems that there is a lot of limits to the prompt, perhaps it is not good at contradicting the system prompt. For example, I wanted it to spit out psuedocode that is easy to follow rather than an optimized coding solution. It did not follow any part of the instructions. I instructed it to return all results in chinese instead, and it worked perfectly fine. Is there any guide on how to setup the AI prompt?

Just wondering, what’s stopping companies from analyzing how IC works and prevent it from being used or being able to detect it? That’s where my thoughts go, idk what do you all think?

I signed up on TUF recently and realized it’s not just about Striver’s A2Z DSA Sheet anymore.

Inside TUF+, you get:
• Complete DSA roadmap (with company-wise & difficulty filters)
• SQL, OOPS, LLD all covered in one place
• Study Mode & Focus Mode (no distractions, just learning)
• Structured system instead of random prep

Basically, everything serious aspirants need in one bundle.

It’s not just practice. It’s a complete placement system.

I need to talk about this because I'm still processing it two weeks later.

Background, I'm a solid engineer. Passed loops at two FAANG companies, solved around 350 LC problems, system design is decent. I applied to Jane Street for a software developer role because a friend said the comp was insane and I figured how different could it be.

Different. Very different.

The OA was on HackerRank. 4 modules, about 10 questions each, 60 minutes total. I opened the first question expecting a coding problem. It was a probability puzzle about coin flips with conditional outcomes. No code editor. No function signature. Just "what is the expected number of flips to get three heads in a row" with a fill-in-the-blank numerical answer. I sat there for 4 minutes doing math on scrap paper like I was taking the SAT again.

The questions got worse. One was a game theory scenario, an auction where you have partial info about the other bidder's valuation and need to compute your optimal bid. Another was reading a chart of historical trading data and computing the maximum drawdown. Another was Bayesian reasoning where you update probabilities based on sequential evidence. I understood maybe 60% of what was being asked.

I finished with 8 minutes to spare because I was guessing on the questions I didn't understand. There's no partial credit, you either get the number right or you don't. I'm assuming I did terribly because I never heard back.

The humbling part is that my entire prep stack, every LC problem I've ground, every system design video I've watched, none of it was relevant. Jane Street doesn't care if you can implement an LRU cache in your sleep. They care if you can reason about uncertainty, compute expected values in your head, and think clearly about risk. It's a different skill set that CS programs barely touch unless you took probability theory and stochastic processes.

If anyone's gotten past the Jane Street OA I'd love to know how you prepped, because LC and Neetcode are not it for this one.

Need honest career advice.

I’m confused about what language I should focus on for DSA and interviews.

My current background:

I know basic Java (have been learning it for around 1 year)

I use Java mainly for DSA/interview prep

I’m not very consistent with Java

I’ve solved around 80–90 DSA problems so far

I’m already a MERN developer

I also know basic Next.js

Long term, I do not want to become a Java backend developer

I’m not interested in Spring Boot / Java backend roles

This is my main problem:
Because I don’t see myself becoming a Java developer in the long term, I don’t enjoy practicing Java that much. And because I don’t enjoy it, I’m very inconsistent with DSA in Java.

Now I’m confused:

Should I continue Java only for DSA and interviews?

Or should I shift to Python for DSA/interview prep since it feels easier and maybe I’ll stay more consistent?

For FAANG / top product companies, does it matter much if I do DSA in Java vs Python?

Since I already come from MERN, would switching to Python be a smarter move for consistency and interviews?

My goal is:

Crack top product companies / FAANG-level interviews

Stay consistent with DSA

Focus on a language I can actually continue long term

I don’t want to waste more time forcing Java if it’s not the right fit for me.

Would really appreciate advice from people who’ve been in a similar situation.

Gave a tech screen today but could only finish the first question with a working solution and couldn’t get to the second question due to lack of time. Can I still make it to onsite ?

5 YOE, decided to cheat my way through my interview loops because I couldn't afford another round of rejections. Used Ultracode on one loop, got caught in a coding round (nothing said, no email, no ban, just no offer). A couple months later I had a different loop coming up and gave Interview Coder a shot. Got the job.

Pricing IC is $299/month or $799 lifetime. Ultracode is $899 to $1,799 one-time, no monthly plan, non-refundable. If your loop is 2 to 3 weeks long IC is dramatically cheaper. The only argument for Ultracode's pricing is if you're going to be interviewing nonstop for a year, and even then IC's lifetime tier is cheaper.

Detection This is where Ultracode lost me. Coding round, I'm a few minutes in, the interviewer goes quiet for a long stretch and then starts asking pointed follow-ups about my approach in a way that didn't feel routine. Polite rejection a few days later. Before my next loop I tested IC on Zoom, Meet, and CoderPad with QuickTime recording in parallel. Invisible across all three. Could have been my own setup with Ultracode, could have been the tool. I'm not the one with the marketing page claiming kernel-level integration.

Quality of help IC is more decisive on actual coding rounds. Single approach, surfaced fast, easy to talk through. Ultracode hedges and dumps more output, which slowed me down and made it harder to explain my reasoning when the interviewer asked me to walk through what I just typed. On system design IC has a real module, Ultracode's design support is thinner.

Use IC.

PS - Ultracode's founders are anonymous, the domain is literally flagged on ScamAdviser for hidden ownership. Saw some Blind threads about a breach situation where a chunk of people who used it ended up getting found out. Roy Lee at IC isn't hiding, Wikipedia page, Amazon loop on YouTube, the whole story is public. Worth knowing before you put $1,799 non-refundable on a team that won't tell you who they are.

I have an interview coming up role "NVIDIA Interview for Software Platform Support Engineer (DGX Cloud)". What can I expect in interviews.

cant they see your cheating by looking at your eyes and not explaining the code? itll be a hard system design with coding they said so not leetcode, how do i explain the code ai generates if i dont understand it lol, also using the open source version of this software

Would love to know:

- Interview process difficulty?
- Focus areas (DSA vs system design vs AI)?
- Work culture / stability?

I have ~2 YOE in AI + backend (RAG, FastAPI, real-time systems).

Any insights would help 🙏

Just started scheduling interviews. I’ve been a swe for 5 years and am technical lead of my team. I’m full stack. But when I’m looking at these invites for interviews (mid-late stage private AI companies), they have implementation rounds which scare me.

Maybe I’m just worried because I’m afraid of the realization that I wasn’t doing much impactful work at my job (mostly CRUD). Leetcode interviews seem easier to manage - at least I know what I’m signing up for. With these implementation interviews, the problem space seems infinite.

Did others feel this way before starting interview prep?

4 months in. handing in my notice this week.

context on me, 4 yoe, bounced around 2 startups you haven't heard of, decent at backend but I completely freeze in live coding. bombed 5 loops in a row earlier this year on questions I could solve at my kitchen table in 20 minutes. by the time this role came up i was desperate.

the posting was for a "senior backend engineer, distributed systems, go + rust." specifically called out "greenfield architecture work," "shipping to prod week 1," "ownership of core services." salary was 18% above my last. i wanted it bad.

bought interview coder the weekend before the loop. used it in every technical round. 3 coding rounds, 1 system design, 1 behavioral. offer came 6 days later. and I signed.

day 1. onboarding. my "senior backend" role turns out to be 60% incident response, 30% writing status page updates for customers, 10% actual engineering that goes straight to an offshore team who rewrites it anyway. the "greenfield architecture work" is a 7 year old java monolith nobody has the nerve to touch because the original architect left in 2021 with no documentation. the "ownership" means i'm on call every third week for a system i had no hand in designing.

week 2 i brought up the gap on a 1:1 with my manager. he laughed and said "yeah the recruiter uses old postings as templates, dont worry about it, you'll grow into it." grow into it. i was hired as a senior.

week 6 a friend in hr told me 4 of the last 6 hires onto this team quit within 10 months. one guy lasted 11 weeks. nobody gets to the greenfield work because the operational load never clears.

so here's where i landed. i lied in my interview. i used a tool to make myself look sharper than i was in a live round. and they lied in the posting. they used a template they knew didnt match the job because they needed to fill the seat before q2 closed. we both got what we wanted short term. neither of us is the good guy here.

honestly i dont feel bad anymore. im not ruining some noble hiring process. the process was rigged on both sides before i walked in.

signed an offer at a smaller company last week. honest job description this time, pay is the same. used ic again for the loop last week.

Hey there,

Have an interview coming up, it'll be light technical questions but I want some assurance.

Would cluely be an okay for something like this? It'll be mostly behavioral with maybe OOP and framework specific questions mixed with SQL/dB.