The stupidest interview I ever had.

I had to write a review because I cannot contain my anger.

I was pointed to HackerRank. When I decided to do it, as soon as I saw the algorithm question, I was extremely happy. Why? Because I had studied it in the past in school, I had used it recently, and I was very familiar with it. I knew three solutions to the problem. I opened up my terminal to write the code and had a solution pretty quickly, but that wasn't the most performant: O(n^2).

I then decided to improve the performance with a better solution. I submitted with confidence and had plenty of time left. I quickly received an email stating that I did not have the proper score.

I was shocked, since all the tests passed both locally and on HackerRank. Most importantly, I knew this algorithm like the back of my hand!

I insisted on pointing out my error. Guess what I was told? And I'm copying verbatim:

"Thank you for your email. The tests do pass; however, it appears that there were similarities between your submission and other submissions that the database has gathered from other engineers who attempted the test."

You have no idea how mad that made me, given that it was 100% my code. The assumption there was that I cheated from one of their engineers.

The fact that they made me waste my time to come to such an inaccurate conclusion is ridiculous. Instead of asking algorithm questions face-to-face and putting a human touch to their process, they rely on a bad algorithm in their database to catch cheaters.

It just so happened I was not one, just someone who studied algorithms extensively. Seriously!?

I was pointed to HackerRank before any contact. (No human touch.)