I had two phone interviews. My understanding is that there is usually only one, and then an in-person interview for the second round. I believe they wanted a second phone interview because the first interview was strangely easy. (I won’t share the question, but it involved simple string lengths, and I could have answered it directly out of my software bootcamp.) The second interview pertained to data structures, and was certainly more challenging. I was prepared for it. However, the interviewer seemed to articulate a different problem than what was copy-pasted from the bank of questions. I won’t share specifics, but he gave me a hypothetical data structure, wouldn’t tell me what specific kind of data structure, said that it was “broken” (nonstandard speak for this kind of structure) and that I had to fix it. I asked questions about duplicate entries, and whether I could, for example, assume it was a BST or a minHeap. He said no, and that it could be any random type of this kind of structure. Then he asked me how I would represent the data structure, at which point I became even more confused. (If I’m given a hypothetical chunk of data, I can assume it’s already represented in some way, such as an array, a linked list, etc... So, what exactly was I given?)

After the fact, I attempted to ask for the wording of the original question but was unsuccessful. It’s entirely possible the interviewer was new to interviewing, or that translation issues resulted in poor communication between us. Overall, it was an awful lot of preparation to be undone by poor articulation of the problem.

Aside from the unfortunate circumstances over the phone, the interviewer (and everyone else) was very nice to work with.

Data structures.