The recruiter contacted me through LinkedIn, and I responded.

It took a while to schedule the interview. For the second time, I had a lousy interviewer.

The interviewer gave me a problem. When I restated the problem and the solution, she went with it. Once I coded it, she said there were additional constraints to the problem that she had not quoted before and kept modifying the problem statement, even up until calculating the time complexity.

How do you solve a problem that you don't define until the end of the interview time?

She seemed very inexperienced and also lacked language and communication skills. The previous time, the interviewer seemed groggy at 10 AM.

Please vet your interviewers!

Given a chessboard, determine if a given black or white piece in a cell is alive or dead. An item is defined as alive if it has at least one non-opposite colored or blank neighbor.

That was the original question. This is how it morphed over the interview:

• The diagonal neighbors don't matter to determine if a piece is alive or dead.
• There need not be just 16 pieces of black or white; there can be an arbitrary number of black or white pieces.
• If a piece is surrounded by the opposite color on three sides, but the fourth side is of the same color but is again surrounded by opposite color, then that's still considered dead. (Why did you not say this to begin with?!) But it is alive if one of them is blank.
• And while calculating the time complexity, she adds, the board can be filled with all black and say one white in the middle, or vice versa. How is that a chessboard?! And why are you telling that at minute 45? If we had continued the interview, I wonder what other additional missing conditions about the problem she would have added that she forgot.