13 Glassdoor picks candidates actually liked interviewing at

I want to share something I wish someone had told me before my first Big Tech interview: the experience varies wildly depending on which company you're talking to.

Not the difficulty. Not the questions. The experience. How organized is the process? Does the recruiter communicate? Do interviewers give you space to think, or does the whole thing feel like a speed-run against a timer? When you leave the building (or close the Zoom), do you feel like you got a fair shot — or like you just survived something?

We track 13 of the most sought-after tech companies in the StrongYes dossier store. For each one, we pulled the Glassdoor interview satisfaction data — the percentage of candidates who rated their experience as "positive." Of those 13, twelve had reliable satisfaction percentages we could rank from lowest to highest; one (Netflix) had data we couldn't extract cleanly, so we cover it separately. The results tell a story that surprised even us.

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The Ranking

Here it is, worst to best.

12. Anthropic — 29% positive

Less than one in three candidates rates their Anthropic interview positively.

That number might shock you — Anthropic is widely considered one of the most thoughtful, mission-driven companies in AI. Employees love working there. But the interview experience is a different story.

The reason: the values screening is the primary failure point, not the technical rounds. Candidates who are technically strong but can't demonstrate genuine alignment with Anthropic's AI safety mission are filtered out — and that filtering feels opaque from the outside. When you fail a coding round, you know why. When you fail a values screen, you're often left wondering what you said wrong.

The role split tells an even sharper story: SWE is 29% positive, but Research Scientist is 100% positive. The starkest role split in our entire store.

Average timeline: 20 days

11. DoorDash — 32% SWE / 53% new grad

DoorDash's SWE satisfaction is near the bottom of the store. But here's the nuance that matters if you're a new grad: the new-grad positive rate is 53% — 21 points higher than SWE overall.

What's happening? Experienced candidates are punished by DoorDash's domain-flavored interview format. Every round uses dasher/merchant/consumer scenarios, not abstract LeetCode framing. If you've spent years prepping with generic algorithm problems, DoorDash's domain wrapping feels like a bait-and-switch. New grads, who have no "expectation template" to violate, adapt more easily.

Generic LeetCode prep backfires at DoorDash. That's not a rumor — it's a consistent pattern in candidate reports.

Average timeline: 23-24 days

10. OpenAI — 32% SWE / 80% Research Engineer

OpenAI ties with DoorDash at the bottom for SWE satisfaction, but the Research Engineer number — 80% — suggests the process works for some roles and fails for others.

The dominant sentiment: the process feels chaotic. Format changes mid-loop. Communication gaps stretch into weeks. Candidates describe a sense of interviewing at a company that is growing faster than its interview infrastructure can keep up.

This matters for your expectations: if you interview at OpenAI and experience silence, schedule changes, or unclear next steps, that's not unusual. It's the norm. Don't interpret disorganization as rejection — it might just be the process.

Average timeline: 30 days

9. Airbnb — 40% SWE / 24% Senior SWE

Airbnb has the widest gap between company culture satisfaction and interview experience in our entire store. Employees love Airbnb — 4.2/5 stars, 94% CEO approval. But candidates dislike getting there.

The culprit: the culture-fit gate and the runnable-code bar. When culture fit can kill your candidacy regardless of technical performance, and when pseudocode isn't accepted at any stage, the process feels unforgiving. And for senior SWEs, the experience gets worse — only 24% positive.

The sharpest sentiment detail: recruiter ghosting and scheduling chaos. Candidates report weeks of silence between rounds, broken scheduling software, and processes that can stretch to 8+ weeks despite a 29-day average.

Average timeline: 29 days

8. Databricks — 43% positive

Databricks sits in the middle of the pack, but the candidate complaints are specific: the concurrency round blindsides people who only practiced standard LeetCode.

When you've spent months solving sliding window and dynamic programming problems, and then a 60-minute round asks you to reason about ConcurrentHashMap internals and deadlock scenarios, the prep mismatch is jarring. Candidates who know this round is coming perform dramatically better than those who don't.

This is why company-specific prep matters. Databricks is not a "hard interview" in the abstract — it's a specific interview that tests a specific skill most candidates haven't practiced.

Average timeline: ~26 days

7. Uber — 47% overall / 78% interns

Uber's overall satisfaction is middle-of-road, but interns love it — 78% positive. The gap suggests Uber calibrates well for intern-level candidates but creates anxiety at the experienced level.

The anxiety source: the Bar Raiser. Uber's cross-company Bar Raiser can veto an otherwise strong loop. Knowing that one person can override four positive reviews creates a specific kind of interview stress that shows up consistently in candidate sentiment.

Average timeline: 20 days (experienced hires)

6. Amazon — 48% SWE / 74% SDE I intern

Amazon's SWE satisfaction is below 50%, but — like Uber — interns rate the experience much higher at 74%.

The consistent complaint: the repeated Leadership Principles questioning is exhausting. LP questions aren't isolated to one behavioral round at Amazon — they appear inside coding rounds, across every interview in the loop. By the fourth interviewer asking "tell me about a time you showed Ownership," candidates report feeling drained even when the process itself moves efficiently.

Average timeline: 24 days

5. Stripe — 49% SWE / 83% Staff

Stripe nearly cracks 50% for SWE, but Staff Software Engineers rate the experience at 83% — a 34-point gap. This suggests Stripe's interview loop is well-designed for senior engineers but creates friction at the standard SWE level.

The standout sentiment: the live debugging round feels like the real hire/no-hire filter. Candidates who enjoy reading unfamiliar code find this round refreshing. Candidates who've only practiced writing code find it disorienting. The debugging round is the most polarizing single round in our entire dossier store.

Average timeline: 4-8 weeks

4. Apple — 56% positive

Apple sits above the median with no role-specific SWE split available. The 56% likely masks significant team-level variance — Apple's interview loops vary dramatically by team, so aggregating satisfaction across all teams obscures how good or bad any individual experience might be.

The most specific sentiment detail: "silence is policy." Long communication gaps between rounds are common at Apple and are not necessarily a rejection signal. If you haven't heard back in two weeks, that's Apple being Apple, not Apple ghosting you.

Average timeline: 23 days

3. Meta — 57% positive

Meta lands in the upper half. The positive sentiment centers on one specific cultural detail: Meta's interviewers give hints. If you're stuck, the interviewer will nudge you toward the right approach. This is a genuine cultural choice — Meta wants to see how you respond to guidance, not whether you can solo a problem in silence.

The negative sentiment: recruiter ghosting and no-feedback rejections. Meta moves fast, but communication can drop off after the onsite with no explanation.

Average timeline: 31 days

2. Google — 62% SWE / 63% new grad

Google is consistently rated well despite the Google Docs constraint and the longest standard cooldown (12 months). The explanation is simple: the process is predictable. Google has been running this loop for 20 years. Candidates know what to expect, interviewers know their roles, and the hiring committee model — while slow — is transparent.

The strongest negative sentiment: the process can feel impersonal. Candidates describe themselves as "a number in a machine." When your hiring decision is made by a committee that never met you, the experience is efficient but cold.

Average timeline: 34 days

1. Microsoft — 64% positive

Microsoft has the highest interview satisfaction in our store, and the reason shows up consistently in candidate reports: interviewers are unusually organized and often give feedback between rounds.

This is rare. At most companies, you interview, leave, and wait. At Microsoft, candidates report getting context and updates throughout the process. The "As Appropriate" round — a separate Director-level conversation for borderline candidates — also contributes: candidates who reach it feel like they're getting a second chance, not a final hurdle.

No formal cooldown means you can reapply relatively quickly after a rejection. That matters for candidates who might need two attempts.

Average timeline: 29 days

Netflix — unranked (data not extractable)

One more to cover, and then the full table. Netflix can't be placed in the numbered ranking above — its Glassdoor positive-experience percentage could not be reliably extracted from available data, so we list it as N/A rather than guess. The 23-day average timeline and candidate sentiment are well-documented; only the satisfaction percentage is the gap.

What we do know: the culture memo is mandatory reading, being too polite is a genuine negative signal, and the keeper-test philosophy means the interview is explicitly filtering for people who thrive under continuous performance evaluation. The experience is polarizing by design.

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The Full Table

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Which Metric Should You Actually Weight?

Here's a quick decision tree for reading this ranking. The "company average SWE positive %" is the headline number, but it's rarely the right number for you.

Diagram

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The chart above is a practical filter: use the right role-level split before you let a company average shape your expectations. Anthropic's SWE-vs-Research Scientist split (29% vs 100%) is the extreme case, but Stripe (SWE vs Staff, 49% vs 83%) and Amazon (SWE vs intern, 48% vs 74%) are not far behind.

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What This Actually Means For You

The pattern is not what you'd expect

The companies with the worst interview experiences are not the ones with the hardest questions. They're the companies where the interview tests something candidates didn't expect to be tested on.

Anthropic tests values alignment. DoorDash tests domain reasoning. OpenAI has a process that feels disorganized. Airbnb has a culture-fit gate that kills half of candidates. These aren't hard in the LeetCode sense — they're hard because the prep mismatch is severe.

New grads often rate the experience higher

DoorDash new grad: 53% vs SWE 32%. Amazon intern: 74% vs SWE 48%. Uber intern: 78% vs overall 47%. The pattern is consistent — junior candidates rate interviews more positively than experienced candidates at the same companies.

Why? Experienced candidates carry expectations from other companies. When DoorDash wraps every problem in domain context, an experienced candidate who prepped for abstract LeetCode feels cheated. A new grad who has no baseline just adapts.

If you're a new grad, take the experienced-candidate reviews with a grain of salt. Their frustration is real, but it's often about violated expectations — expectations you don't have yet.

Role splits reveal more than company averages

Anthropic SWE: 29%. Anthropic Research Scientist: 100%. Stripe SWE: 49%. Stripe Staff: 83%. Airbnb SWE: 40%. Airbnb Senior SWE: 24%.

The company average hides enormous role-level variation. Before you research a company's interview, find the Glassdoor data for your specific role and level — not the company aggregate.

The friendliest interview isn't the best job

Microsoft has the highest satisfaction at 64%. That doesn't mean Microsoft is the "best" company to work at — it means their interview process is the best-organized, most communicative, and most predictable. Those are qualities of the interview, not the job.

Don't choose where to apply based on interview satisfaction. Choose based on where you want to work. But when you're nervous before an interview, it helps to know: at Microsoft, the odds are that you'll at least feel respected throughout the process.

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Sources and Methodology

Every percentage, timeline, and role split in this post is traceable to a specific company's public Glassdoor interviews page. The data in this post was collected and verified in early 2026. Glassdoor updates rolling percentages as candidates submit new reports, so the exact numbers will drift over time — the ranking order and the sentiment patterns are the durable signal.

• Glassdoor — company interview pages. glassdoor.com. Search any company's name and filter to "Interviews" to see the rolling "positive experience" percentage, sample questions, and recent candidate reports that feed the ranking above. Per-company URLs follow the pattern glassdoor.com/Interview/<Company>-Interview-Questions-E<numeric-id>.htm.
• Levels.fyi — compensation and leveling context. levels.fyi. Where Glassdoor tells you how the interview felt, Levels.fyi tells you what it paid and what level the offer was pegged to. Pairing the two is how you build a realistic expectation model for any company on this list.
• StrongYes content directorate — per-company dossiers. Our internal dossier store tracks role splits, sentiment themes, and candidate reports across all 13 companies. The sharpest-sentiment column in the ranking table is our editorial summary of what candidates consistently flag as the hardest-to-prepare-for friction point at each company.

If a number here looks wrong, the fix path is usually a drift in Glassdoor's live data. Re-pull the company's interviews page, compare to our published percentage, and assume the more recent number is the correct one.