As with any interview, YMMV. My own experience was pretty negative - I got asked a question where one pretty much has had to have studied &amp; memorized the approach to solve the question, with no live feedback or direction but mostly silence. I enjoyed a far better process with Facebook, where the interviewers at least made an active effort to engage my mind in the right direction if I blanked or was missing a key piece of knowledge, although their methodology for evaluation leaves some to be desired.<p>Personally, I greatly dislike how software engineers are hired in the industry, coming from a prestigious graduate program of mathematics. There is an expectation at some of these companies that the candidate studied for their interview (or got just the right set of questions), even if they demonstrated highly valuable skills such as figuring out a complicated trick on the fly without any prior knowledge of anything similar. If one wants the smartest people, it is well-known in academia that that is not how one should evaluate a candidate, so I am not quite sure why such shallow &amp; flawed metrics continue.