After applying, I had a phone conversation with the first recruiter about background and desired position about a week later. Another week later, I had a second conversation with another recruiter, more focused on technical skills and the interviewing process. The next step was a remote coding interview using a shared Google Doc.

Before the interview, the recruiter sent me a link to the interview guidelines, stating that the main focus should be providing at least one fully working solution with clear and well-formatted code, and then reviewing it with the interviewer. This review would include explaining thoughts, ways to test it, corner cases, and so on.

At the beginning of the interview, I was told we had a hard time limit of one hour. The interviewer spent about 20 minutes asking non-coding questions, such as which libraries I had used in my previous work and what challenging tasks I had encountered.

Then, I was given a programming assignment. Due to the lack of time, I started implementing it using the most obvious approach. I was able to finish my solution in about 20 minutes, leaving 20 minutes remaining. The interviewer mentioned that my code would use too much extra space, although no limitations were given at the beginning.

We spent more than 10 minutes walking through the code. Afterward, the interviewer admitted that, except for when two corner cases are applied simultaneously, it wouldn't use a significant amount of memory.

Following this, the interviewer said the solution was fine but that the expectation was the creation of code making an in-place operation (though this wasn't stated). They then proposed I provide this kind of solution with 5 minutes left in the hour.

I wasn't sure of my ability to create a full solution in the given amount of time, so I just provided a pseudocode algorithm. I was denied, with the feedback being, "due to insufficient knowledge of CS basics."

I am unable to share due to an NDA. It was a relatively easy question about changing the order of elements in a basic data structure (like an array or list) according to the data within the structure and some additional parameters. It was not sorting.