50+ Real Interview Qs That Actually Get Asked in 2026
I've been on both sides of the table — bombed interviews at companies I wanted, hired devs who crushed leetcode but couldn't debug a race condition. Here's what's really being asked right now, and why most people answer it completely wrong.
Most interview prep advice is written by people who haven't interviewed in 5 years. Or worse, by FAANG engineers who think their process scales down to a 12-person startup. It doesn't.
In 2023 I was hiring a senior dev for my SaaS doing $8k MRR. Got 200 applicants. Ran 40 interviews. Hired one person. The guy who got the job answered half the algorithm questions wrong. But he could explain exactly why our Postgres queries were gonna fall apart at 100k rows. That's the interview nobody writes about.
System Design Questions
These separate the seniors from the cargo-culters. Real answers aren't about drawing perfect diagrams. They're about tradeoffs.
1. Design a URL shortener. 2. How would you scale a chat app to 1M users? 3. Walk me through your database indexing strategy. 4. How do you handle rate limiting? 5. Explain eventual consistency like I'm paying for the infrastructure.
Wrong answer: perfect architecture. Right answer: knowing what to cut first when things break at 2am.
Behavioral Questions Nobody Preps For
6. Tell me about a deploy that went wrong. 7. How do you push back on a bad technical decision? 8. Describe a time you shipped something you knew was kinda janky. 9. How do you decide when done is done? 10. What's the worst technical debt you've personally created?
That last one's my favorite. Watching someone own their mistakes tells me everything.
Coding Questions Still Getting Asked
11. Reverse a linked list. 12. Find duplicates in an array without extra memory. 13. Implement debounce in JavaScript. 14. Binary search on a rotated array. 15. Write a simple LRU cache.
Leetcode hard? Rarely. But leetcode medium with a follow-up about real-world tradeoffs? Every single time.