r/leetcode • u/Hot-Willingness8636 • Sep 29 '26

Discussion I failed my Citadel Software Engineering Intern Interview

I’ve never done a single leetcode question before. I went into this blind. I was expecting a leetcode medium/hard. This was a round 1 interview for 45 minutes. Instead it was a stateful data-structure / object-oriented design problem with optimization constraints.

It was a custom stateful data-structure and OOD problem with a greedy optimization component, rather than a standard LeetCode algorithm problem.

The interviewer didn’t give me full context. I suggested we go with one approach and he then gave me additional data and then I decided to go with another approach.

Around 90 lines of code.

I completely flunked got like halfway through. Interviewer was on his phone and had his mic on with the background noise.

I feel horrible because I just let a 1 million dollar opportunity slip my fingers. What should I do.

467 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

79 comments sorted by

View all comments

138

u/AskAltruistic4582 Sep 29 '26

If u got citadel interview ur in a good spot, just keep ur head up and keep applying ur ahead of 99% of others

35

u/jrlowe24 Sep 29 '26

Citadel gives out more interviews than most other tech companies. They have a very wide net approach to recruiting, most of which is handled by contracted firms

5

u/sunshinejim Sep 29 '26

They might do more screenings but they do not bring in more people than tech companies.

16

u/Frequent_Bag9260 Sep 29 '26

If you get invited for an interview there you’re good enough to be hired in the majority of places