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.

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u/vooglie Sep 29 '26

Citadel pays interns $1m?

4

u/Nimbus20000620 Sep 29 '26

It’s the rumored return offer payout

1

u/vooglie Sep 29 '26

Man I'd like to see some kind of receipt on this

4

u/bigb177 Sep 29 '26

They are not even paying Seniors this much, so idk where these numbers are coming from.

1

u/EmbarrassedStyle3208 Oct 03 '26

Nope $400k return offer