Deceptive interview practice for a 60-minute tech screen.

Here's how it went:

Introduction: 5-10 minutes.

Interviewer: "So, we are going to present some questions to you that we want you to solve through CoderPad."

Interviewer: "Act like this is a pair programming session." (but no further explanation of what that actually means was provided).

Interviewer: "Make sure you are talking through what you are doing, and how you are thinking, as we want to know how you solve problems."

Question 1: A simple problem, finished in approximately 10 minutes.

Question 2: As I was solving this, I ran into a couple of things. One of which was a bug in the Golang Docs page for the standard library. Then I ran into another problem regarding CoderPad not letting you import non-standard library packages. Then I ran into another problem in my implementation that I didn't account for, which had to do with duplicates. Then I ran into another problem in my implementation that I didn't account for, regarding a non-nominal initial implementation that would result in non-deterministic behavior.

I was verbose through all of this. Every "shortcut" I took, I was upfront about, and explained why I wasn't doing something in a particular way, and asked them to let me know if that was a "requirement". I also dropped statements about Big(O) performance characteristics of this and that, etc. By the end, we reached the 50-minute mark.

Questions: 5-10 minutes.

--- Seems all well and good.

I received a response less than 24 hours later that they "decided to go with another candidate". I called the recruiter to get more information. He stated I didn't complete all the questions in time. Oh, that must have been a three-part question! Well, they didn't set any expectations for what "success" meant for this interview.

Recruiter: "Actually, it was a four-part question."

Ok, so what they actually wanted was for me to complete a four-part question in 40 minutes.

I wasn't told how many parts there were going to be, so I wasn't thinking about pacing or anything like that. I'm also imagining that each part of the question gets harder than the last, so it seemed I was set up for failure.

Given X input, write a function that produces an output like Y. (Specifics redacted for fairness)