A recruiter contacted me on LinkedIn about my interest in relocating for roles in the USA. I replied that I was.

I had a phone interview with the recruiter, lasting 40 minutes. We discussed what I work on and my interests, and I learned about Groupon and the relocation process. I was told there would be a technical screen call with an engineer. If successful, I would be invited to a hiring day in Sydney or Melbourne, Australia, which would consist of 4-5 interviews. If successful, I would be notified within 1-2 weeks with an expectation to relocate within 2-3 months. The recruiter was friendly and answered all of my questions well.

I then completed a phone technical screen. It was quite easy; I was asked to implement my own atoi() function in C.

A few days later, the recruiter got in touch. I had performed well, and they asked if I would attend an interview day in Sydney a few weeks later. Many engineers were flying out to Australia, and I would be required to complete 4 back-to-back interviews during the day.

I took a day off work and attended the hiring day. I had four interviews. I performed very well in two of them, answering the questions with plenty of time to spare and providing working solutions, which I then built upon with additional problems.

The third interview did not go well. I was stumped by the question and took the completely wrong approach.

The fourth interview was okay. The coding question was easy, but it was followed by some harder system design questions that I did not answer as well as I could have.

After the four interviews, the recruiter thanked me and promised to get back to me the following week, or the week after at the latest. Two months later, I have not heard anything.

I am not surprised or disappointed not to have received the job offer; I knew I had performed poorly in the third interview. However, after taking a day off work and traveling a long distance to attend, I find it quite rude that I haven't even received an email to say thanks, but no thanks.

All the interviewers were extremely nice and friendly with me, and they answered my questions about their experiences at Groupon. Many had moved over from Australia in years gone by, so it was good to get their perspective. One interviewer was not so good; he entered the room, did not introduce himself, asked a question, then stared at his watch the whole time and did not really interact with me.

Given a start word, an end word, and a list of valid words, implement an algorithm to return all words from the start word to the end word, where each step changes only one character at a time.

For example, given "Cat", "Dog", and a list of valid words, return:

cat -> bat -> bet -> bot -> bog -> dog