There were a series of emails exchanged, and I was passed through three different recruiters.

I proceeded to an initial phone interview to discuss skills, background, and next steps. The recruiter I spoke with on the phone was curt. She asked a few broad questions, including why I would want to work at Google. I replied that I enjoy fast development with a small, agile team. She misunderstood me and suggested that I should apply to Facebook instead because they have a more constant release cycle. This question and her generally haughty tone left me feeling pretty defensive and not thrilled about continuing. Nevertheless, I was given a technical phone interview a week and a half later.

I did not know what to expect from the technical phone interview. I was sent an email detailing a long list of potential subjects, which I studied broadly. Instead, I should have been practicing coding problems. The technical interview consisted entirely of two programming questions. I coded on a Google Document along with the interviewer. I could only partially complete both questions.

• The first question was, "Given a binary search tree populated with numbers, find the closest match to an incoming number."
• The other question was, "Given an array of strings, find the common prefix."

I left the interview knowing I had very little chance of continuing. Despite this, the recruiter called about a week and a half later to decline, but invited me to try again in "12-15 months." The call left a sour taste in my mouth as I again experienced a condescending attitude in a scripted call, especially when a simple email would have sufficed.

Given an array of strings, find the common prefix.