The first round consisted of a 2-hour interview, one for coding and another for system design. This was not an onsite interview; it was just the first round. I am used to 1-hour coding interviews, but why was 2 hours given? Also, after wasting my time, the recruiter did not provide any feedback on what went wrong or right. They rejected me outright, even though I thought I did pretty well.

The first coding question:

Given a restaurant name, find other restaurants in the list that are k-anagrams with each other. A name is a k-anagram with another name if both the conditions below are true:

• The names contain the same number of characters.
• The names can be turned into anagrams by changing at most k characters in the string.

For example:

• name = "grammar", k = 3 and list = ["anagram"]: "grammar" is a k-anagram with "anagram" since they contain the same number of characters and you can change 'r' to 'n' and 'm' to 'a'.
• name = "omega grill", k = 2 and list = ["jmega frill"]: "omega grill" is a k-anagram with "jmega frill" since they contain the same number of characters and you can change 'o' to 'j' and 'g' to 'f'.