I applied online, and a recruiter scheduled a screening session. After that, a tech interview was scheduled. I failed the tech interview.

It felt like I was writing a college exam, not appearing for an interview.

The recruiter wasn't professional. She was trying to sell the company more than giving me important details about the role. We went overtime but couldn't finish the conversation. I wanted to ask some interview-specific questions. She said she would call me back in a couple of hours, but she never did.

Then, I sent an email to her with my question. I received an automated response from her mailbox stating she was on leave for the next five days and would return the day before my interview. So, I redirected my query to another recruiter who was on her CC.

That recruiter replied that she would wait for the main recruiter to answer my question. It felt like I had gone to a government office.

My question was very specific: I wanted to know if the tech interview would cover both LeetCode-style DSA and database questions, or only DSA. I knew it would be DSA, but I wasn't sure if I should prepare for an SQL round since it was for a database team.

Her reply was as diplomatic as it could be. She wrote a long email saying that there was no way to prepare for this interview. What a load of BS! As if interviewees are stupid and we don't know what a typical tech interview covers in the current industry.

I accept that I didn't do well in the tech interview. I mentioned the edge cases that I should cover, but when I started writing my code, I forgot to account for them. The interviewer did not stop me from making that obvious mistake.

Later, during testing, when I found out I had missed that crucial edge case, it was too late to fix the code. I had hoped the interviewer would at least stop me and give me a subtle hint so that I wouldn't waste my time and his time writing code that would never cover the important test case. It's okay even if missing the edge case means a 'no,' but not stopping the candidate from making such a mistake is wasting everyone's time.

Convert encoded string to a frequency array.

For example:

1224#26# is mapped to abxz (input is 1224#26#) 1224#(2)26#(4) is mapped to abxxzzzz

Return the corresponding frequency array.