Went through Dell's online assessment and two live coding rounds a few months back for a mid-level SWE role. Sharing the full breakdown because I couldn't find much recent info when I was prepping.
Online Assessment (OA): Two coding problems, 90 minutes, HackerRank platform. The first problem was a medium-difficulty array/string manipulation question. The second was harder, closer to a medium-hard graph traversal (BFS, not tricky but you had to recognize it was a graph problem before anything else). Both had edge cases in the test suite that felt like they'd been written by someone who actually uses the code.
No system design in the OA. No SQL. Pure algorithmic.
Live Coding Rounds (2 rounds, 45 min each): These were on CoderPad. Format was: brief intro (5 min), one coding problem (30 min), time for questions (10 min). The problems were medium difficulty, leetcode-equivalent. One was a sliding window problem on arrays, one was a tree traversal with a twist.
They watched me talk through my approach before coding. I got a hint on the second one when I went down a wrong path, which was appreciated. Not adversarial.
Difficulty comparison: Honestly lower stress than Google/Meta but harder than some smaller companies. Think: needs real CS fundamentals, not just memorized patterns. You can get by on mediums but you need to be clean and methodical, not just "I know this is BFS" but actually working code.
Language choice: Python was fine. They didn't care. One interviewer mentioned their team uses Java internally but said the coding round is language-agnostic.
Timeline: OA invite came 5 days after applying. Results in 4 business days. Then two weeks of scheduling and live rounds. Total from apply to verbal offer was about 6 weeks for me.
If you're prepping: NeetCode 150 mediums cover most of this. You don't need to grind hard patterns, just be comfortable and communicative.