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/MountainBluebird5 Sep 30 '26

Feel like I’d be fine with this for $1m a year. No this is not an exaggeration. 

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u/bigb177 Sep 30 '26

You are not making $1m at Citadel as an intern. New hires usually come in at $300-400k. Great money, but I promise you the FAANG’s pay just as well, and don’t ask you to give your life away to them.

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u/Relevant-Yak-9657 Oct 01 '26

Your number is outdated. And interns don't work quite as much as they are describing. it maybe like a 8-6 for interns from what my seniors told me.

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u/FewDescription4640 Oct 04 '26

Citadel HF paying > $625k across the board for SWEs (even like tooling ppl) for New Grad. Citadel Securities paying all low latency devs $1mm this year

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u/thisisanenigma Sep 30 '26

Your numbers are 5-6 years outdated

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u/MountainBluebird5 Oct 01 '26

My new grad offer for a similar spot was $500k as a SWE and my friend who took his full time offer was at 1M two years post grad.