The first step was a simple coding challenge. There were two problems: one involved easy string manipulation, and the other was a more complex data structure problem with a time requirement of O(n log n). After passing that, I moved on to a phone interview.

This phone interview remains my worst interview to date. It wasn't due to an overly challenging problem or being under-prepared. The issue was the horrible phone quality. The interviewer sounded as if they were on speakerphone, several feet away from their device, in a cement room, with a tinny or echoey sound. This combination was so atrocious that I couldn't understand 99% of what they said. It was so bad that they had to type the problem to me instead of speaking it, simply because I couldn't understand. Because of this, I couldn't ask questions effectively, and when they tried to give advice, I couldn't understand it. Overall, I failed this interview, but it was deeply disappointing to have such a terrible experience with a company as large as Google.

Given an array of strings, write one function that will take that array and turn it into a singular string.

Then, write another function that will take the output of that previous function and return an array identical to the original array.