I applied online. I interviewed at Discord in Nov 2024
Interview
Passed the phone screening easily. The next phase involved a live coding challenge. According to the interviewers, after the coding challenge, there would be a virtual onsite which would involve about 4 more interviews.
The coding challenge required a surprising amount of code given the time limit (75 minutes, ~130 lines of code). Some of the requirements will not be told to you until after you complete a basic program, but these could easily be mentioned at the beginning to streamline the process. I spent about an hour of the time making sure the program worked very well, with exception handling, threading, and clean design. I took my time because there was no indication a "part two" was coming. By the time I got it, there wasn't enough time to fully finish it.
It felt like a waste of time because of this. It would have been straightforward to finish if I knew a "part two" was to be expected, but I spent so much time making my solution high quality because I was under the impression there was only one problem to solve. Seems they were more interested in coding as fast as possible and seeing how the interviewee handles a "gotcha", instead of focusing on quality and performance of code.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a chat server using sockets that can accept multiple client connections via telnet.
Applied -> Recruiter -> HM -> Tech Screen.
First three rounds went great, but the Tech Screen was a very different experience, and felt very out of time with modern software interviewing practices.
I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Discord in Jun 2025
Interview
Seemed pretty organized. The "resources"section tells you that they will ask you to build a chat app using TCP clients. I did and practice or reading on it. During the interview, they didn't want you looking at ai responses when you Google. Googling for documentation is allowed.
Got the code working that satisfied all requirements. They asked some questions on how would you do this and that after as well. Got rejected soon after. Not really sure where my performance warranted a rejection but oh well.
Recruiter reached out after seeing my application. They already had asked me to install telnet on my system and about building a chat server using sockets. Did a background reading on that. Got the code working during the interview with some guidance from the interviewers. It should handle multiple clients.
Got rejected next day. No feedback, nothing.
Not sure what the interviewers want these days - a fully working Whatsapp ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ within 1 hr?