The first phone screen was a blast. Not only did the interviewer communicate well and clarify the questions, but the question itself was also pretty good: simple in the beginning, and capable of deepening in different ways. I enjoyed the first phone screen.

The second one was a disaster. The voice quality was horrible. The interviewer probably used a laptop to call, because all I could hear was lots of echo, and the voice kept breaking up. English is not my native language; throughout the whole hour of the interview, I had a very difficult time understanding his words and thinking at the same time.

The bad communication probably went both ways. Five minutes after I had already described and even noted down the tradeoffs in terms of complexities and worst-case scenarios of one solution, the interviewer asked about the time complexity. When I asked if I should go down one way of solving the problem, he said no, but eventually, at the very last second of the interview, I realized that was actually the intended way. I can only conclude that the interviewer either couldn't understand or hear me, or didn't know the thinking process of getting to the final solution he wanted.

Overall, this was my worst phone interview experience.