Southwest Airlines Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

Met recruiters at my college STEM fair and gave them my resume. They had me give them their resume and apply online. After I applied, I waited about a month with no word except the recruiter who shared his number with me. After a month, I was contacted via email to schedule first round of the interview via phone. The process then, assuming I passed this round, would be one round of technical interview and the last round of interview. In total, the interview took three days (besides the initial waiting time), with the interviews taking place one day after the other. I was then contacted about a week later about their decision. The recruiters, especially my last interviewers, were really nice and friendly. I asked them about Southwest culture and things they liked about Southwest, especially Halloween, which had just passed, and they had a lot of fun stories.

It was a terrible experience. I went to the office and had to wait an hour before an interviewer found me. We then moved to a conference room where two people joined via Teams, but none of them had their cameras on, which felt like a red flag. The lady, who seemed to be the lead, communicated poorly and started shouting at me, which was shocking, though the other two were calm. I answered their Java and AWS questions. The lady told me I shouldn't make excuses and that if I thought I couldn't handle the tasks, I shouldn't join, also mentioning that most software engineer consultants are fired within two months.

I applied online, then a recruiter reached out and set up a 1-hour Teams call. She asked technical and behavioral questions and was really nice. I passed that, and then had a panel interview with 6 people. I answered everything, but the next week the recruiter told me they hired a contractor who was already working there. That felt weird because companies usually hire contractors directly. The whole thing felt like a show because they probably just wanted to hire that person anyway, but still had to do the process. It wasted everyone's time and energy, very unprofessional.