A recruiter reached out to me and sent a standard three-question HackerRank assessment. I passed all test cases for all questions within the time limit.

Next, I was scheduled for a one-hour video interview. The recruiter let me know to expect a mixed technical/behavioral interview.

During the interview, the interviewer spoke mostly about the company at length, asking only two behavioral questions, for 45 minutes. They then presented a poorly-worded array search/iteration question in a shared coder-typer.

I presented a brute-force approach, and then, just as I was about to move on to the optimized approach, the interviewer asked me to code the brute-force solution first. This wasted the majority of my remaining time.

After coding the brute-force solution, I was cut off at the one-hour mark. There was not nearly enough time to adequately address the question and present an optimized approach.

Beware.

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