I was contacted by a recruiter and sent a 60-minute take-home coding challenge to be completed in two weeks. This challenge was not looking for correctness or necessarily optimization, but more for readability and good design practices.

I was genuinely excited about this challenge, as it greatly differs from the industry standard of only '100% passing, perfectly optimized' code being accepted. As an engineer with two years of industry experience, I spent nearly 10 days straight reading up on the best design, naming, and architectural practices of industry standards.

Luckily, the problem turned out to be quite easy, and I finished within the allotted time. I made sure to clearly name, label, and comment each and every function and variable with crystal-clear descriptions, names, and meanings. I modularized the program to have near-perfect interaction between the components. I even provided a driver function with a description on how to run it with a simple test case.

However, after all of this, I was denied a phone interview.

As I said, I was genuinely excited about this interview, with their emphasis on writing clean and readable code. Yet, they did not seem to uphold that standard. When I asked the recruiter for feedback, I was ghosted.

Just for fun, I copied my code into an IDE after submission to test on some sample test cases, and my code passed every single one of them. Very strange process.