I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Discord in Oct 2021
Interview
One phone call with the recruiter then a technical phone screen. The recruiter call is the usual recruiting screen but he made a point of saying that they don't do Leetcode interviews.
The technical interview was a very niche problem that you could have had in a CS undergrad course but if you didn't see such a problem in your previous work or schooling, having a fully complete and working application might not be possible given the allotted time. As others have noted, this isn't scalable.
I also want to address the trailblazing "unique" interview, though: this made me appreciate the fact that employers are still using Leetcode! The reason is that it's something you can prepare for and there's a standard rubric by which you can judge people. This doesn't make it a good interview process for judging candidates but when you are preparing for interviews and you have Discord among them, an interview like this taxes your time if it is not your absolute priority to work there. That being said, it was a learning experience.
Discord also brags in their online blog posts that they have calibrated such questions internally. So the data point this gives me is that they will be breathing down your neck while you do your work. They will also expect you to complete a lot of work quickly while their equity options may never materialize--versus other options out there at least. These are factors you should consider while interviewing with them. The exercise is supposed to approximate working with a fellow employee. But an employee doesn't have optimal learning and experimenting conditions if they are going to have a certain set of unrealistic expectations thrust upon them. Pair coding shouldn't be time-limited or stressful, so Leetcode becomes preferable to this type of format.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The question was given in another review here. There's no way to prepare for this unless you see the review here, so prepare and study projects having to do with socket servers, I guess, until they change to some other niche question.
Applied -> Recruiter -> HM -> Tech Screen.
First three rounds went great, but the Tech Screen was a very different experience, and felt very out of time with modern software interviewing practices.
I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Discord in June 2025
Interview
Seemed pretty organized. The "resources"section tells you that they will ask you to build a chat app using TCP clients. I did and practice or reading on it. During the interview, they didn't want you looking at ai responses when you Google. Googling for documentation is allowed.
Got the code working that satisfied all requirements. They asked some questions on how would you do this and that after as well. Got rejected soon after. Not really sure where my performance warranted a rejection but oh well.
Recruiter reached out after seeing my application. They already had asked me to install telnet on my system and about building a chat server using sockets. Did a background reading on that. Got the code working during the interview with some guidance from the interviewers. It should handle multiple clients.
Got rejected next day. No feedback, nothing.
Not sure what the interviewers want these days - a fully working Whatsapp ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ within 1 hr?