OpenAI Software Engineer Interview Experience — Delayed Feedback in a Binary Search Problem

This was my OpenAI rejection experience. Both the coding and system design questions may have been new, because I had never seen either one before.

The coding problem had two parts, and both seemed related to binary search. In the first part, I had to implement binary search to guess a secret number. There was a function that reported whether my guess was too low or too high, but its response was delayed: the result from the second call corresponded to the number I had guessed on the previous call. The wording was very convoluted, and I did not finish the first part, so I never saw part two.

The system design prompt had even more text than the coding problem. The scenario was to monitor the electricity use of different devices in real time and then adjust usage strategies based on that consumption. In essence, it seemed to be a monitoring system.