On the initial call, the screener told me that the coding interview would be a series of coding questions on a certain skills-testing website, so that is what I prepared for.

It wasn’t that at all—the interviewer placed me in an unfamiliar online environment and basically said, “Build a web app, go,” with very little guidance.

I wasted too much time trying to figure out how to import different packages into the environment, while the interviewer was unclear about whether that was expected. Then he said, “Time’s up,” and was not interested in hearing any more about my thought process.

Build a web app that looks like xyz.