A month after applying, I received an email asking to set up time for a phone interview. Not once but twice they cancelled on me and I had to reschedule. I was nice about it; I expect that kind of thing once, but twice was a bit much. They always cancelled about 5 minutes after the scheduled time had passed.

I finally got the guy on the phone the third attempt, 2 weeks later. He asked a lot of behavioral questions: what's your strength/weakness, best project, worst project, previous work experience. He asked me a few technical C++ questions, nothing crazy. In a Google Doc, he asked me several programming quizzes, such as to design a stack.

Got an email the next day asking me to do a technical test (which I thought I had just done over the phone, but whatever). It said to spend UP TO 4 hours and return it within a week. An unusual time constraint, but fair enough, I thought.

The question was to design and implement a game of Checkers against a primitive AI. Certain checker rules had to be required, such as mandatory jumps to capture over normal movement and English draughts, and chain jumping.

I spent EXACTLY 4 hours on it, no more, no less. It seems easy, but to test a full game of checkers over and over as you add and remove features is not exactly easy with a 4-hour time constraint. And foolish me, I didn't really want to cheat the time even though I could have easily done so. And apparently, I should have.

Honesty does NOT win here, folks. Despite all the testing I could have done, despite all the features I implemented, it took them 3 weeks to get back to me and they said no with zero feedback. Despite the fact I submitted much earlier than their requirement, I implemented all the rules, I had the jump chaining, the only bug I was aware of I thoroughly documented and could have fixed with a little bit of extra time. The AI was a bit more advanced than they asked for too, and with an extra 15 minutes, I could have easily put in move evaluation/minimax too.

All that effort was not good enough. For what reason, I will never know it seems. A waste of time, even after all the cancellation grievances. I wonder if my code was even looked at.

The HR lady I was speaking with was extremely nice though, all things considered, and she said she tried to find other graduate positions I could maybe fill and said there were none available. If the guy didn't cancel on me and got back to me in less than 2 months, maybe that would have been different...

Create a game of checkers using specific rules against an AI. The game must have an ASCII GUI or better, and be completed in 4 hours.