This was a typical recruiter meet and greet, after which a one-hour technical assessment with a senior engineer was scheduled.

During the Zoom meeting, we briefly discussed my background, including my most notable project. Then, we proceeded to a coding quiz on CoderPad.

There were two questions. Both were simple data structure manipulation questions involving hashes and arrays. I completed the first one relatively easily, but I stumbled a bit on the second and unfortunately did not finish it.

After presenting an initial solution, I was expected to explain the time complexity of my functions. Unfortunately, I have no practical or theoretical experience with Big O notation, so I struggled through that part with many "I would have to look that up" type answers.

Overall, it was a decent experience. The senior engineer was cordial and offered leading advice when I got stuck during the coding portion. However, it's somewhat disheartening that, as an industry, we still evaluate technical skills through these LeetCode-style and theoretical scenarios. For someone already employed, it's stressful to grind LeetCode and memorize "Cracking the Coding Interview" material just to secure a job that you know you are capable of doing.

A question about a list of strings that you need to transform into a hash. Explain the time complexity and the memory usage of the function.

A question about nested arrays with links to other arrays. You need to understand recursion to find the most optimal solution. Then, explain the time complexity.