The recruiter reached out on LinkedIn asking if I was interested in exploring some opportunities. It was a good conversation; he talked about the team and work. We agreed to move forward with the phone screen.

The first red flag was that the interviewer seemed surprised, more than disappointed, that I would be interviewing in a programming language not to his liking.

He asked me a two-part question. Assuming the first part was the only question (my fault), I spent 10-15 minutes just thinking, "What's the catch? Why is this so easy?" And there was none; it was an easy question.

After 20-25 minutes in the interview, he asked me the second part. We discussed possible approaches, and it took me some time to convince him with my final approach.

Finally, I started working on the code, which I finished on time. I did some code cleanup and addressed the interviewer's questions.

We were left with around 10 more minutes, and he asked if I had any questions. I assumed he was satisfied with the solution and started talking about the work, which was quite similar to what I have been doing in my current position. It sounded like a good match.

After the interview was over, I verified the code by running all the cases that we discussed, plus some more corner cases. Other than a couple of compilation issues, there were no logical errors.

The next day, I received a standard rejection email from the recruiter. I don't know the reason, but I assume it's because I had to think about a solution and didn't know it in advance.

I had better expectations from this organization; I am extremely disappointed.

It was an interesting question.

I can't disclose it due to an NDA.