OpenAI Software Engineer interview experience

I used a simple map-based approach, and the interviewer actually seemed to enjoy watching the code get built and explained as it went.

Then the system design part got more complicated because I didn’t immediately understand the requirements, so I asked a lot of clarifying questions at the beginning. Once I had the shape of the problem, the discussion became about distributing work for large dictionaries and breaking it into subtasks. Even though I eventually worked toward a coherent plan, I still left the interview feeling uncertain about how strong the final story was.

It ended up turning