Applied online November 2013.

• A few days later, I spoke with a very knowledgeable recruiter.
• Within 2 days, the tech phone screen was scheduled using Coderpad. I didn't have enough time to finish the problem.

Overall, the questions were on the difficult side for a phone screening. I wonder how many people can produce working code in 40 minutes. I would recommend people try the two questions and give yourselves 40 minutes for each. The code needs to be compiled and working. Please comment on this post and tell me how long it took you.

1. Find all combinations of a string in lowercase and uppercase. For example, string "ab" yields "ab", "Ab", "aB", "AB". You will have 2^n (where n is the number of characters in the string) output strings. The goal is to test each of these strings to see if it matches a hidden string.

2. Implement a simple regex parser. Given a string and a pattern, it returns a boolean indicating whether the input matches the pattern. By "simple," we mean that the regex can only contain the special characters: * (star), . (dot), and + (plus).

   • The star means there will be zero or more of the previous character in that place in the pattern.
   • The dot means any character for that position.
   • The plus means one or more of the previous character in that place in the pattern.