u/aaaa12378

Industrials coverage, Charlotte. Applied late September through the campus portal. Four stages, about seven weeks from application to offer.

HireVue: Four questions this cycle, two minutes each with 30 seconds to think. Everything I read from last year said three, so that threw me for the first one.

They asked why banking, why Wells Fargo, and a competing deadlines story. The last one was to name an industrial company I had been following that year and say why, and that is the one people fumble. If you have not actually read anything about the sector it will show immediately.

First round: 30 minutes on the phone with an Associate who was clearly working off a checklist. Resume walk, then a DCF walk, then how you get from EBITDA down to free cash flow, then the classic one where you write down inventory by 10 and take him through all three statements.

The question that actually mattered came at the end. Why Wells Fargo over a bank with a bigger M&A league table position. I do not think there is a clever answer to that. I talked about the balance sheet and the financing side and he seemed satisfied.

Superday: Four rounds onsite in Charlotte, 30 minutes each, straight through with no break.

The Associate round was the most technical. A paper LBO at 5x in and 5x out with half debt, then senior secured versus unsecured and which one prices tighter, then how a revolver draw moves through the model.

A VP did a mix of technical and fit. When I would use a DCF over comps, then the leverage question, two identical companies where one carries more debt and which one has the higher equity value. He also asked about a time I disagreed with someone on a team.

A second VP from a different coverage group spent almost the whole 30 minutes on markets. Where rates were sitting and what that had done to industrial issuance that year, then pitch him a company in the sector that should get acquired.

The MD round was really just fit. Why Charlotte, what I actually thought an analyst does all day, and walk him through the hardest thing on my resume.

Outcome: Got rejected nine days later, though one. Ask me any question you want and I'll do my best to answer.

I’m currently paying $160+ a month across AI tools, productivity apps, and vibecoding tools. Is there a single agent or tool that can do all of it?

(excluding model tokens, ofc: Claude, Codex, etc.)

29M. A couple of friends from college became interviewers at big tech companies after working there as engineers for a couple of years, and I asked them recently about cheating software and how they detect people using it.

They told me they don't even really care about it anymore.

Like, so many people are using them that it would be ridiculous to ban hundreds of candidates at a time for something so widespread. Also, this is not only for big tech, startup interviewers give even less of a fu** / don't even know if you're using cheating software.

Crazy how cheating was considered abs wild 2 years ago.

I'm so done with Poke. It has the worst memory OAT, and all the good features are on Pro, which is $20 a month. And worst of all, this whole thing is vibecoded.

The entire product is made by a bunch of amateurs, and I run into bugs all the time.

What's the best AI agent currently? Preferably one with a free trial.

I’m a startup founder, and we’re funded by a large, well-known VC fund.

We recently recruited this Stanford kid because he looked great on paper. He had won a bunch of hackathons in college and did great in his internships at Meta and Amazon.

He gets paid competitively, almost $200k, and even has equity in the company. However, most days, he doesn’t even come into the office and just codes from home and we've recently found out he's just vibecoding…

We found out by reading the comments on his code, which made it pretty obvious. His stack is Claude Code, Folk, OpenClaw, and Cursor.

Don’t get me wrong, his work has been fine up to now, but I never knew he was a vibecoder and was just pushing AI-generated code into our codebase. I’m not technical and often find myself a bit disconnected from the tech bubble.

Is it normal for a founding engineer to vibecode in August 2026?

Question for all the interviewers: What percentage of people you're let's say 95% sure are using Cluely actually get flagged and banned from the company?

Like do kids (especially interns) get away with cheating every day or do a lot of people get flagged, rejected, blacklisted, etc.? Asking for a friend….

Here's the 2026 process for IBM round by round.

Online Assessment (60 to 90 min, HackerRank): One to three problems, easy to medium. I got interval merging, process scheduling time and distinct-count partitioning.

Recorded Competency Interview (AI-led, no live interviewer): Around five pre-recorded behavioral prompts, a couple of minutes each. Every answer should land on one of the THINK values: curiosity, collaboration, continuous learning, responsible innovation. (bc of IBM values and stuff)

Technical Interview (45 to 60 min, one or two rounds): Coding is like LeetCode medium level and rarely harder. Arrays, strings, linked lists, hash maps. Mostly about OS concepts, Linux basics, OOP, and SQL. Second-highest salary, multi-table joins, normalization, then optimize the query you just wrote.

Resume Deep Dive (folded into the technical round): They go project by project. Why that database, why that pattern, what you'd change.

System Design (senior and Band 8+ only, 45 to 60 min): Questions about stuff like driven by access patterns, hot partitions solved with composite keys and bucketing, delivery guarantees, observability. Propose, then state the tradeoff, then say how it fails and what you do when it does. (thats how I handled it at least)

Managerial / HR Round (30 to 45 min): Work history, adaptability, conflict, why IBM.

Anyone gone through the IBM loop this year? Curious whether the recorded round is still five questions or if they've expanded it.