Brief description of my work experience, followed by two coding questions on HackerRank for screen sharing. Syntax was not a factor; the interviewer just wanted to see the algorithm.

I coded as fast as I could, stumbled slightly, and corrected myself quickly. I even presented a recursive and completely correct solution to one of the problems. It was obvious the interviewer wasn't prepared for an out-of-the-box answer, and as such, had difficulty articulating his canned follow-up question.

Despite the pressure of coding while holding a phone in one hand and a laptop in the other, I felt confident with my performance and enjoyed the interview (I don't say this about all interviews). Three days later, I received an email that they were not moving forward with the application. I felt like punching a wall after that.

Given a matrix of integers and a starting point, find all adjacent neighbors with the same value, and repeat the process with each identified neighbor.