First, I passed the phone interview. Then, I was invited to the onsite interview. The whole interview process went smoothly. I could not finish my response to two questions; however, I did well in the other three interviews. I received the rejection after two weeks. When I asked the recruiter for feedback, they told me my solution was not optimized. "You could have used a better data structure," they said. This seemed ridiculous to me because the interviewer looked totally satisfied, and I was under the impression that I was done. Generally speaking, it sounds to me a bit random who they extend offers to.

Decode a string like <4ss<c1>> into a real string.