I had an hour-long phone interview that included a coding test, for which a laptop was required. A recruiter later scheduled an on-site interview.

I was told by an interviewer that they use Python 2.7, Go, and Scala. They do not use Docker themselves, even though they offer monitoring for Docker containers. This, to me, is a bad sign. They are gradually moving away from Python toward Go. They have no plans to migrate to Python 3, also a bad sign. Moreover, an interviewer became quite defensive about Python 2.7 when Python 3 was discussed during the on-site interview.

The strangest part of the interview was that they inexplicably canceled my planned lunch and the final round of the interview. This felt rude, considering I had to take a day off to be there. The reason they gave was that they had a production issue.

I received feedback after three business days that they went with another candidate who had Python instrumentation experience. This is odd because no one asked me about my general Python instrumentation experience during the interview; I have it even on GitHub. Moreover, I had previously been informed by multiple interviewers at their company that the interview was for a general fit, agnostic to any particular programming language.

The on-site coding interviewer didn't even have an IDE or code editor set up on the laptop used for the coding test portion.

Write a function to indicate if a string containing multiple instances of the characters "(" and ")" along with other unrelated characters is balanced.

Upon writing this function, explain how you would write a function to detect for balance despite the presence of zero or more ASCII emojis in the string. The second part of the question was ambiguously defined, and the interviewer persisted with it despite acknowledging its ambiguity.

Given a set of four-digit numbers, and two numbers A and B which are in the set, indicate if A and B are chainable. Any numbers X and Y are chainable if the last two digits of X are the first two digits of Y, with any number of chainable numbers in between. For example, given the set {8363, 6388, 8183, 5364, 8353, 8365, 9380}, A=8183, B=6388, yes, A and B are chainable (as [8183, 8363, 6388]).

Note that the problem was described quite poorly by the interviewer. He initially used the term "list" rather than "set." Only after much prodding for different examples did he clarify that he actually meant a "set" and not a "list." He asked me to describe the solution before coding it. Although I described a perfectly accurate but somewhat inefficient solution, he went on to add a requirement that he wanted a more efficient solution. Once we decided upon the efficient solution, I had only five minutes remaining to implement it.

Tell me about a time when you were disappointed in your performance at work. What did you do to resolve the matter?