They conduct two phone screens before inviting candidates onsite. These phone screens consist solely of coding problems in Coderpad, with no conversation.

In fact, there was no conversation with anyone throughout the entire process, not even a recruiter.

I sensed that the engineers were disengaged from the start, likely due to being assigned to phone screen duty. There was no back-and-forth discussion at all.

As I was thinking through the problems aloud, both engineers stated they preferred not to influence my thought process and would therefore make no comments. One engineer asked at the beginning, "Do you want to tell me about yourself?" After I began talking, I realized he wasn't truly interested in the answer. I stopped after 30 seconds to give him an out, and he replied, "OK, that's fine, here's the coding question."

I greatly prefer technical interviews that emphasize the collaborative element of talking through a problem with potential future colleagues, where one can debate various solutions. Groupon's process is extremely un-collaborative and signaled that Groupon was not a good match for me.

Fortunately, this experience was an exception, and I encountered much better phone screens and coding exercises with other companies.

Write a simple RegEx parser function that handles only the operators * (0 or more) and + (1 or more), and returns true if the provided string is a match. Signature: boolean isMatch(String regex, String input).

Example: regex = ab+ce, input = bce, return true Example: regex = ab+ce, input = ace, return false Example: regex = a*b+ce, input = abcee, return false

Write a function that prints the node count for each level of a binary tree.