We built a crowdsourced interview question database for tech interviews

https://www.interviewdb.io

85 73 1 year ago

When prepping for tech interviews, my go-to strategy has always been to scout online for any interview questions and insights people have shared. However, this process is incredibly time-consuming. Information is scattered across multiple platforms: Leetcode Discuss, Glassdoor, 1point3acres (IYKYK) and often buried under low-quality or vague posts. Many threads are just people asking for questions rather than sharing them (Leetcode Discuss I'm looking at you), and even when questions are shared, they often lack enough detail to be truly useful. Typically you have to go through a lot of posts before landing on a good one. To solve this, we built interviewdb.io: a crowdsourced database where people can share real interview questions they've encountered. To incentivize contributions, we’ve implemented a points-based system: you earn points by submitting questions and use them to unlock others.

You might ask: Why Not Just Use Leetcode Tagged? We see InterviewDB as a complement to Leetcode Tagged, not a replacement. Here’s why: 1. Many companies are poorly covered on Leetcode Tagged, with little to no data. 2. No context on whether a question appeared in an OA, phone screen, or onsite. 3. Companies often tweak Leetcode questions, making them harder to recognize under pressure. Seeing real-world phrasing helps. 4. Leetcode doesn’t cover system design or company-specific interview formats/processes.

We launched recently and already have ~5,000 users contributing and benefiting. The more people join, the more valuable this will be for everyone. Would love to hear your thoughts and feedback!

INTPenis• 1 year ago

Kinda sad that it has come to this.

Maybe I'm naive but I think an interview should be an honest exchange of what you actually know, not what you crammed for before the interview.

wcast• 1 year ago

In fact, for me it is pretty hard if not impossible to remain genuine to my ability and personal touch to navigate corporate world having to swallow all those keywords and behave properly in front of interviewers. Thinking that hacking/mastering it is often the single way out.

pc866• 1 year ago

Not sure it should really be "hard if not impossible" to "behave properly."

AnimalMuppet2• 1 year ago

It should be. If the interview tests for what you crammed for, it doesn't test for what you'll remember a month onto the job. That's a sub-optimal strategy for the interviewer.

windward2• 1 year ago

Devil's advocate: there exists a corpus of questions solvable with a small number of techniques after a few weeks of decicated study. When someone has the right brain, these questions are the barrier to a 99th percentile income. What does it say about an interviewee that doesn't bother?

criddell• 1 year ago

I occasionally interview people and that wouldn't really bother me. If you can learn something once you'll be able to re-learn it down the road when needed.

I've found myself in that situation helping my kids with their homework. I might not be able to define L'Hôpital's rule off the top of my head, but it only takes a few minutes of reading to reload it into my brain.

TheBigSalad2• 1 year ago

I agree but I companies like Meta/Apple/Amazon hire so much that they probably have full time statisticians just to analyze interview process and map that back to performance. So you have to assume this maps to real world success. Even if you are just testing an employee's preparation, maybe that means something.

lesuorac• 1 year ago

It's not probably.

The hiring rubric gets items added/dropped based on what portions are statistically significant when compared to post-hire performance reviews.

There's a lot of research in the public about "Structured Interviews".

Etherlord87• 1 year ago

The "Big corporation analyzes everything thoroughly and arrives at the most optimal solution" is a ridiculous myth, and I don't think I even need to give examples. Maybe not Apple, but Amazon surely has a lot of embarrassing failures.

creativityhurts• 1 year ago

Interviewing went from something you had to get a job to a completely different skill and even a business.

pc866• 1 year ago

I struggled early in my career with interviews. Granted this was 2008-2010 era so the job market was not great, especially in a not-quite-urban non-coastal city where I was for a junior developer.

But something did change when I stopped treating interviews as "convince them to like me" / "convince them to hire me" and started treating them as "find out if I want to work (in order) 1) at this company, 2) on this project, 3) with/for this person." I'm sure part of it is just experience, knowing more of the technical stuff, sure, but when you're approaching it honestly as determining whether you give a shit about the person sitting across from you or the glorified Excel spreadsheet you'll be working on it is a lot easier.

It's a big part of why I hate leetcode interviews and consider them a huge red flag especially for non-Tier 1 companies. If your 90 minute interview is 80 minutes of me reversing trees and writing maze solvers then letting me ask 2 questions while you check your email and Slack on your other monitor I am not learning anything from the process and am extremely uninterested in working for you.

mavelikara• 1 year ago

What makes those questions ok for Tier-1 companies to ask, in your opinion?

scrapcode2• 1 year ago

I've had two "Online Assessments," as they're called, in the past couple of weeks and they're even weirder than that now. The request access to my desktop, webcam, microphone, akin to a proctored exam. They don't let you use your own editor, or even leave the window. There is no one there to interact with, ask clarifying questions, etc. It then plays everything back with keystrokes sync'd to video/audio for the reviewer.

If I have to go through that bullshit, I would at least like the opportunity to use it to show how I think, ask clarifying questions even if it is just to show understanding of edge cases, create some small talk, etc.

swiftcoder3• 1 year ago

Maybe I'm naive but I think an interview should be an honest exchange of what you actually know, not what you crammed for before the interview.

All the way back in ~2012, Amazon's own recruiters were recommending candidates cram "Cracking the Code Interview" (to the surprise of the actual interviewers, who didn't want you doing that). This is the way things have been for a long time now.

jollyllama• 1 year ago

Maybe it's time to question it. I don't think there's anything wrong with the now traditional whiteboard interview as such, but the notion that the same questions are all just as relevant to disparate teams is highly questionable. Technical questions should be based on the actual codebases or systems, IMO. I would also question the Hogwarts style approach of interviewing the candidate as a generic dev and then sorting them to the right team.

blindriver2• 1 year ago

It hasn't been an honest exchange of what you actually know in over 20 years.

GaryNumanVevo• 1 year ago

When you're interviewing junior developers, you have no standard measure, they don't have enough actual experience to speak to. So before a leetcode and CTCI, you'd either have junior developers who went to a good university and were able to get an internship via that network, or they made some great open source contribution or project on the side as a student

penguin_booze• 1 year ago

Indeed. This has turned into a show about nothing. Recreational and competitive programming sites incentivize candidates for speed and one-upping. With such a group in the candidate set, companies rose up to the challenge of defeating them at their game by picking even harder questions. With the rise of AI, candidates don't even have to know or read the question.

And eye for eye leaves the whole world blind. I don't think there are any winners in this war.

burnstek• 1 year ago

Every day I thank god I finished my career in software before Leetcode-driven interviewing became so popular.

thih9• 1 year ago

Curious, did you retire or move to a different field? If the latter, what are you doing now?

cryptozeus• 1 year ago

“Technical review by experienced developers Our team of engineers with experience at top tech companies reviews each question for technical accuracy, relevance, and clarity.”

Which engineers which top companies? It’s all very ambitious.

prismatix• 1 year ago

I'm on mobile so maybe the desktop experience is better, but it would be nice to search by job title rather than company.

corpulentboss• 1 year ago

Hot take - these types of interviews are caused by "elite overproduction" - there are too many very qualified and capable programmers, so the end result is a process that is selecting for the most agreeable and obedient personalities who agree to put up with these gauntlets.

neilv• 1 year ago

In the dotcom boom, my impression was that (pre-existing Microsoft interviews aside) current techbro interview baggery was caused by a bunch of affluent people rushing into the field, and (for various reasons) seeking to erect barriers to entry for people who are not them.

But now most people working implicitly assume that the interviews are supposed to be some BS test rituals, rather than a collegial dialogue. So now we're just beating anyone who tries to climb the ladder to get the bananas.

I think you're right that there's also something to the obedient corporate drone theory, for some very large and stodgy companies, in the exact flavor of interview nonsense that they do. But at the bulk of tech companies, I think a lot of hiring managers just want people who will be productive and professional, and these interview rituals don't seem to be good indicators of that.

It may also be that "elite overproduction" is also going on, depending on how you define the terms. Or just oversupply of people who meet the (as XKCD put it) "our entire field is bad at what we do" bar for competence. But in any case, I don't think that overproduction is the cause of the nonsense interviews, but maybe overproduction permits the process to be ridiculous.

risyachka• 1 year ago

If by “elite” you call everyone who can write some js then sure.

If you mean developers that know at least something about software- then this is definitely not the case.

nsxwolf3• 1 year ago

For those who work in the dark matter of the industry, there are no real resources because most places don't even have "question banks". When an interview request pops up on my calendar, I just go out and find a random question - it's totally disposable and unlikely to be used again, and we don't interview enough for someone to compile enough information on us.

None of the places I've interviewed at in the last 5 years are on this list. One of them has a single question reported on Glassdoor and wasn't similar to what I was asked.

kccqzy• 1 year ago

Bigger companies do have question banks. Finding a random question at interview time makes it (1) difficult to compare across candidates; (2) makes the interviewer work too hard since the interviewer hasn't first thought about the question and makes the hints given to candidates less useful.

And Google, being the maker of a search engine, was good at detecting leaks of their questions.

madcaptenor• 1 year ago

I work for a large company that hires a lot of developers. If you're in the US you've heard of us and there's maybe a one-in-three chance you're our customer. We are not "sexy" though. I have seen question banks circulate occasionally but when it's time to actually interview nobody can ever remember where the question bank is. Usually when I've been on a team that's actively hiring we make up a bank of questions for that particular round of hiring, which helps us in comparing those candidates that are directly competing against each other. But nothing at scale.

kyawzazaw2• 1 year ago

It's definitely reused again.

And there are definitely question banks. I saw my team go through (the company recommended lists) in a meeting and we selected some questions

nsxwolf3• 1 year ago

Yes, question banks exist. I'm talking about the company I work for and in fact all the companies I have ever worked for. We did not use question banks.

GuinansEyebrows• 1 year ago

For those who work in the dark matter of the industry

Can you be more specific about what this means?

nsxwolf3• 1 year ago

Most software engineers work at companies with names the average person wouldn't recognize. Like, some random B2B company in Ohio that manages corporate gift cards, with 100 total employees. Multiply that by a million. These companies may come up on Glassdoor, but there won't be enough posts to get any kind of consistent pattern on how they run their interviews.

dangus• 1 year ago

This gamified payment model is not my cup of tea.

The whole vibe of this site seems like it’s more interested in growing user count and making money rather than helping people.

I also feel like “crowdsourced” is a euphemism for “stolen content.”

Sure, it’s a capitalist world and I’m not against starting a business, but this feels like something supremely lazy, like the author is hoping to make money without any of the effort of starting a real business. Just be a middleman to other people’s work.

Idk, good luck competing with AI chatbots.

nottorp• 1 year ago

Maybe the real business model is to sell the data to the LLM trainers.

Unless said LLM trainers figure out some way of downloading all the data without paying...

travisgriggs• 1 year ago

Maybe after this “takes off”, they can explore some other domains.

“We built a crowdsourced examiner question database for pilot exams.”

“We built a crowdsourced set of best responses for marginalized peoples who come in contact with hostile police officers.”

So on, so forth.

Then they can franchise it into a set of “exchanges”.

arealaccount• 1 year ago

They do actually have crowdsourced databases for pilot exams now that the question bank is not longer published by the FAA

rvz2• 1 year ago

Yet, these tech interview tests and questions have already been gamed to death by very clever folks like the creator of InterviewCoder: [0] who is now making more than $100K a month out of it.

But do you know what? Good. It is for the best.

This also signals the definitive end of Leetcode, Hackerrank and all the other useless online assessment tools. It is now a completely ineffective tool thanks to AI.

It also is an example that fits the Y Combinator definition to find those who are "hacking a system to your advantage" instead of a "computer system".

Whoever built this destroyed the online assessment system with all its participants in it.

If you're still using online assessment tools like Leetcode, it's now time to find a much more rigorous method of interviewing candidates and also bring on-site interviews back.

[0] https://www.interviewcoder.co/

Fokamul• 1 year ago

Do you really need this?

It's usually enough to think as HR/recruiter. Aka open favorite LLM chatbot and let it generate these questions. Because that's what they will do.

anonu• 1 year ago

So safe to say these questions wont be showing up on any upcoming interviews.

kube-system2• 1 year ago

Might want to include a DMCA takedown address, so that you don't get them sent to your upstream provider. I regularly submit takedown requests to other sites when I see my interview questions posted there. I'm sure others do as well.

apical_dendrite• 1 year ago

Is an interview question copyrightable?

I am sure that if someone is uploading the specific wording of an interview question, then that would potentially be a copyright violation. But if they're just describing the problem in their own words (for instance "I was asked to design a system for selling movie tickets") then there shouldn't be a copyright issue.

seafoamteal• 1 year ago

Not sure what the legal technicalities are, but one of the questions I saw on the site was just a picture of a the user's screen with the question on it, so it's definitely more the former than the latter.

kube-system2• 1 year ago

Yes, the bar for copyright protection on written text is very low. And I've never not seen them just plainly copy/pasted.

If someone rephrased them I really wouldn't have an issue with that, because the phrasing is fairly important to the particular questions I'm asking. (and the doofuses using these sites probably would miss any nuance when rephrasing them anyway)

voodooEntity• 1 year ago

I mean, if theres people that need this i won't judge - but im in tech for ~20 years now and its really not hard to formulate interview questions if you know what the target position is and also have a little of social skills.

zeroq2• 1 year ago

As a hiring manager or company owner (I wore both hats) I developed a routine during the interview that basically leads to a breaking point.

I want to either drill down your bullet points to find out if you're actually an expert in XYZ as the resume claims, or work with you on a coding problem that's simple to understand yet more complex than leetcode challenges.

I don't expect you to ace, but I want to check if you're honest and willing to admit your limitations - my philosophy is that I hire humans, not compilers, no one knows how everything, and I'd rather have someone who's fast finding correct answers on the internet than someone who had memorized a book.

That's how I like to do it. Its been so long that I don't even remember when I myself was treated this way during an interview.

ericjmorey• 1 year ago

You're not filtering on honesty, but desperation. The desperate will lie because of the higher stakes for themselves.

nusl• 1 year ago

I dunno. If your immediate response is to lie rather than admit that you don't know something, it increases the probability that this is the person's default response when in such a situation. You don't want that person working for you if you depend on them for critical stuff, like many development or similar positions.

If you've ever worked with someone like this, you'd know that it's frustrating and unpleasant mid-to-long-term. Someone breaks prod and refuses to admit it unless given a commit as evidence and a confrontation rather than owning up and fixing/helping fix it? Pretends to know everything then produces terrible work that sucks more hours out of other devs? Nah.

Admitting fault and lack of knowledge is important, and it's different to ignorance.

If you're desparate, actually know your stuff, and still lie, that's on you IMO. If you don't know your stuff and you lie, you probably wouldn't have made it anyway.

nh23423fefe• 1 year ago

That presumes I can't catch people lying to me?

blindriver2• 1 year ago

Blind, Leetcode and Chinese sites like 1point3acres have a ton of interview questions.

akihitosan• 1 year ago

I think hiring process is broken, many capable candidates are eliminated until hiring someone. Time and money is lost, hearts are broken :)

Maybe there is a big opportunity for a startup, that will revolutionize hiring.

sadeshmukh• 1 year ago

Just curious - where is that hero image from? It feels familiar

antonkal• 1 year ago

How about HackerRank assesments?

We built a crowdsourced interview question database for tech interviews

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