u/jamesswindon

First of all, I will admit we’re still miles away from reaching any sort of meaningful milestones concerning climate change and data centers, and yes, I will absolutely admit that data centers are huge accelerators of climate change.

However, I think we are at peak inefficiency with AI, and that model selection will soon be democratized as a concept, drastically reducing the environmental costs of artificial intelligence. Then, regarding energy, there are absolutely massive data centers being developed all around the world (Europe, America, Asia, etc.) that are aimed at providing all three continents with huge amounts of energy, making it much less of a scarce resource.

Not even to mention the hundreds of thousands of people across the globe switching to electric cars every year!

For all these reasons, I am hopeful. I think people are coming together and starting to take a stand against mass data center production and other polluting elements, which gives the issue more visibility. I think climate change is most dangerous when it is ignored, which isn’t the case right now.

Writing this post down because almost every guide I read had the order wrong and the questions weren't accurate.

Recruiter screen (30 min): Logistics, level, comp, she named the org up front. Vehicles, Energy and Autopilot run differently, so find out which one owns your req before anything else.

Hiring manager call (45 min): Kinda casual but switched up mid call. I asked what the team has to ship next quarter and reused that answer in every round after it.

Online assessment (Codility, 85 to 90 min): Three problems, mostly medium. Arrays, strings, hash maps, one heap.

Technical phone screen (60 min): Live coding, you need to make a very practical solution. He cared a lot that I had to catch my own bug before he had to point it out.

Onsite (4 rounds, 45 to 60 min each): Two mediums, graph traversal and a sliding window. I was told I could search and open docs during the round. That is genuine, but they're watching closely what you do with them.

Low-level design: Design an over-the-air update manager for the fleet. Class hierarchy, staged rollout, rollback on partial failure (vehicle-adjacent). System design: Collect and process fleet telemetry in real time. Ingestion queue, stream processing, time-series store for recent data against a warehouse for history, then failure modes and reconnect storms. Behavioral: First principles. The prompt was a decision I made from fundamentals rather than precedent.

Evidence of Excellence: After the panel the recruiter asked for a one to two page write-up of my most significant technical achievement. Draft it before you need it.

About five weeks end to end. Senior offers can sit longer in approval. Does anyone have any question ??

Had this realization yesterday. I don't think I've ever seen an online investment banking interview where the person didn't cheat / have some sort of assistance.

I've seen everything from a friend holding answers, to Cluely, of course, to various homemade vibecoded invisible software, but never just a singular fair interview.

Why is cheating so normalized in banking interviews?

Finished a Netflix L5 loop this cycle. Fastest process I have been through, about three weeks start to finish. Also the least standardized.

Netflix has no company question bank. Interviewers write their own problems around what their team builds which makes it much more complicated. Two candidates in the same org can get completely different interviews.

Recruiter screen (30 min): Background, why Netflix, comp discussed openly.

Hiring manager screen (45 to 60 min): Deep dive on two past projects, architecture decisions, incidents, and whether my domain lines up with the team's work.

Technical phone screen (60 min, CoderPad): One practical problem (Others in the same cycle got merge intervals and an in-memory file system with mkdir, ls, addContentToFile).

Onsite: coding (60 min): I had a rate limiter, metadata cache, graph traversal on recommendation paths. You also need to write unit tests for all of them.

Onsite: system design (60 to 75 min): Mine was ads frequency capping, multiple rolling windows enforced at once, check-and-reserve separated from impression logging. Another candidate got video streaming and got grilled on CDN and adaptive bitrate for the full 75 minutes (absolute hell lmao).

Onsite: data modeling (60 min): Schema and query work against real playback and session scenarios.

Onsite: behavioral, often two rounds (60 min each): Culture Memo, tied hard to specifics. Autonomous calls you made alone, candid feedback that changed a direction, a mistake you owned publicly, a system you deleted.

How the decision works: The teams looks at your result as a whole (like all your interviewers combined) and they decide wether it's a pass or fail based off of the candidates they've interviewed.

I can answer any of your questions in the comments.

I want to quit interviewing so bad, but my manager won’t let me. I deal with kids cheating all day, and I have never been able to prove it. Sometimes I feel like they’re just doing it to ragebait me.

I know they’re using it, but our technical team has no flipping way of detecting it reliably, so I just sit here pretending that they’re using their brain to solve the questions.

You should be able to stay at a company while quitting a specific team…

I've been trying to get myself to use an AI agent to automate repetitive work but I just haven't found the right one yet (I’m an agent). Either it's made for kids or just super work-oriented which is really not what I'm looking for at the moment.

Could anyone recommend another agent (ideally also quite cheap) that can help me automate stuff like sending messages, emails, booking stuff, etc.

I’d really appreciate it.