Went through the Sony Pictures online assessment and coding rounds last month for a mid-level frontend engineer role. Sharing the format and difficulty because the prep resources are thin.
Online assessment. Sent about a week after the recruiter screen. HackerRank platform. Two problems, 90 minutes total. You can use any language.
Problem 1 was a medium-level string problem. Something like finding all valid substrings matching certain criteria. Clean, unambiguous problem statement.
Problem 2 was a graph/tree traversal. I'd call it medium on the LeetCode scale. Not easy but not the kind of problem that requires knowing some obscure trick. Standard BFS with a twist on the return value.
No tricky edge-case traps, which I appreciated. I've done online assessments where the test cases were clearly trying to catch you on weird null conditions, and this wasn't that. They seemed to want to know if you can write clean functional code, not if you've memorized graph theory.
Coding round in the virtual onsite. Two problems in 45 minutes with a live interviewer watching. This is where the pressure is different from the async OA.
First problem was easy-medium. Basically arrays and hash maps. I finished in about 12 minutes and we spent the rest of the time extending it: what if the input was a stream? what if we needed to handle concurrent updates? Good signals-based conversation.
Second problem was a medium dynamic programming problem. I initially went to a brute-force recursive approach and the interviewer let me, then asked if I could optimize. When I caught it and pivoted to memoization, that seemed fine.
General prep advice for this process: LeetCode mediums, not hards. Practice full-length 45-minute sessions. Verbalize your thinking. Both rounds seemed to value explanation as much as correct output. For frontend roles: they did not ask React/JS-specific coding questions in either round, just general algorithms. The stack-specific stuff came up in behavioral and the cross-functional discussion instead.
Overall difficulty: manageable for someone who's done consistent prep. Not a slog.