NewsBreak Interview Questions
& Process

Went through multiple rounds with NewsBreak — including an onsite and a week-long case study — only to be completely ghosted afterward. No feedback, no “thanks but no thanks,” not even a one-line rejection email. Just… silence. It’s honestly impressive how a company this big can’t manage the basic courtesy of closing the loop. If this is how they handle candidates who spend hours doing free work, I can only imagine how they treat employees once they’re on payroll. Pro tip: if you value your time (or basic professionalism), look elsewhere.

A recruiter reached out via email to set up an interview. I emailed the interviewer a week before to ask what to focus on, but got no response. So, I studied DSA and felt really ready with LeetCode based on Glassdoor comments. The interviewer surprisingly started speaking Chinese, assuming I knew it. We began by discussing my background and past projects in detail. Then, I was asked an easy SQL question. I hadn't used SQL in a while and it completely threw me off. I struggled to remember the syntax and functions, and it was a mess. I barely got the query done with a lot of help. The problem itself was simple, but I was unprepared for SQL. It was a bad experience. If you're going to test candidates, you should at least let them prepare properly instead of expecting them to know everything without notice. Total waste of time.

So there was this phone call first, they just asked about my background and how I found out about NewsBreak. It was super quick and easy, and then they set up the interview. The first round was mostly about my resume projects. Then they hit me with a coding problem: reverse a linked list in chunks of k. I coded it up, but it had bugs, so I didn't pass. I think my project experience wasn't a good fit for what they wanted, and the resume questions were pretty casual. Ended up getting rejected.

The interview process was pretty straightforward and went pretty smoothly. Each person I talked to asked good, relevant questions to see if I'd be a good fit for the team and the job. It was nice that the recruiter kept me in the loop the whole time, which made it less stressful. The leadership team was really impressive—they're all super qualified and showed how much they know and care about what the company is trying to do during our chats. All in all, the process really gave me a good feel for the company culture and how much they focus on doing things well.