After applying online, I received an email from a recruiter regarding a few background questions and time slots for a technical phone screen. This step eliminated the need for an HR phone screen, though I was given the choice to set one up if it had been required.

The phone screen lasted 45 minutes in total, with a 5-minute introduction, 35 minutes to solve the problem, and 5 minutes for questions. The question itself was an application of data structure concepts in real life, rather than a typical LeetCode problem, which I found very interesting.

I should have taken a step back to think about the solution rather than jumping directly into coding. This approach led to an incomplete solution that didn't handle a subset of test cases, ultimately resulting in rejection.

I wished the interviewer had caught this issue while I was coding, rather than waiting for me to complete and execute the code on a few test cases. Consequently, my experience felt more like a programming contest than pair programming.

Assume you have a location service that tells you all the sub-regions that comprise an input region. For example, if you input "Earth", it will return a list of all the continents in the world, such as ["North America", "Europe", ...]. Or, if you input "United States", it will return the states ["California", "Oregon", ...].

Given two regions, write a method that returns the smallest region that includes both inputs. For example, "California" and "Mexico" should return "North America". Or, "San Francisco" and "Virginia" should return "United States".