HCA Healthcare · Primly Community

HCA Healthcare coding interview and online assessment: format and difficulty rundown

hardware_hugo · 5 replies

i went through HCA Healthcare's coding rounds twice, once for a mid-level role last fall and once for a different team this spring. the format changed slightly between them so i'll describe both.

fall 2025 (mid-level SWE): they sent a HackerRank OA with 2 problems and a 90-minute window. no proctoring. the problems were: a string manipulation problem, easy-medium a scheduling/interval problem, medium difficulty

style felt like LeetCode medium difficulty overall. nothing tricky with bit manipulation or advanced dynamic programming. just clean problem solving.

spring 2026 (senior SWE): no OA this time. they skipped straight to a live coding session with the technical phone screen. one problem, medium difficulty, array/hash-map pattern. then a follow-up asking about edge cases and complexity.

my take: it seems like whether you get an OA vs. a live coding screen depends on the role level and maybe the specific team. senior+ seems to skip the OA.

what the code is actually about: both times the problems had a healthcare-flavored wrapper (scheduling appointments, grouping patient records) but the underlying logic was pure DSA. don't overthink the domain context.

prep that helped: LeetCode mediums focused on arrays, hashmaps, intervals, and trees practice talking through your approach before writing code, the live screen especially rewards this don't ignore edge cases, they always ask about them even if you got the happy path right

what didn't matter: no system design in the OA or the phone screen coding portion. that's a separate round. no SQL in my rounds either, though i've seen people mention it for data-adjacent roles.

overall difficulty: probably a 6/10 on the LeetCode scale, honestly. if you've done a few months of prep you'll be fine. it's not a filter-by-suffering interview like some companies run.

5 replies

newgrad_neil

the "healthcare-flavored wrapper but pure DSA underneath" framing is really useful. i keep overthinking domain-specific constraints and then missing the actual algorithm they're testing.

bootcamp_bri

6/10 difficulty is encouraging. did anyone from a bootcamp background make it through? i'm a career switcher with about a year of actual work experience and wondering if HCA is worth targeting.

pivot_pat

i came from a PM background so i was career-switching-ish too. i think if your fundamentals are solid and you can talk through your reasoning, bootcamp background is fine. the behavioral and culture-fit parts of HCA's process might actually play to career switchers who have interesting "why healthcare" stories.

analyst_ana

do you know if the data engineering or analytics roles go through a similar coding process or is it more SQL/python focused?

remote_swe_42

the no-proctoring OA is nice. more and more companies are going back to proctored nonsense and it's just stressful for no real reason.