ByteDance Software Engineer interview experience

The interviewer’s English was extremely difficult to follow, and it made it nearly impossible to know whether I was understanding the prompt correctly.

When I moved into another round later, it stayed challenging in a different way: the questions tested a mix of algorithmic problem-solving with tight time constraints, and even for a back-end role there were front-end topics baked in. That mismatch threw me off under pressure because I felt like I was being evaluated across boundaries that weren’t aligned with what I expected.

Across these stages, the overall feeling wasn’t just “hard