This was a typical recruitment experience, particularly concerning the apathetic engineer during the phone screen.

I found the listing on LinkedIn, and a recruiter reached out for a quick phone call.

Initially, there was typical sales jargon about the company's rapid growth. This was followed by the technical phone screen.

My experience was almost identical to another candidate's feedback from September 2018. I was on a call with a standoffish individual.

He pasted a question into a HackerRank IDE and remained mostly silent. I attempted to engage him by asking questions and seeking feedback, but he responded with single-sentence replies.

I completed the problem in about 35 minutes. I made a couple of syntax errors, largely due to nerves, but I managed to write an efficient solution without significant difficulty.

I asked several times if I was missing anything or if there was anything he wanted me to expand on. The response was consistently "no." I believed I had performed well, but apparently, that was a mistake. If there's one thing to learn from my experience, it's not to interpret a lack of feedback, even when your code is working, as a positive sign.

With 15 minutes remaining in the scheduled call, I asked if I could ask questions. He granted me five minutes.

I asked a few questions about the teams and culture. His responses were unenthusiastic. The call then concluded.

Afterwards, I felt quite positive about my performance, considering the code was functional, we finished ahead of schedule, and the interviewer offered little to no pushback. I was expecting a favorable outcome.

However, I was wrong. After two business days, I received an email from a "no-reply@" address stating, "We've gone with a stronger candidate."

Confused, I contacted the recruiter to thank her for her time and requested feedback, especially given the significant discrepancy between my perceived performance and the outcome. Not surprisingly, I did not receive even a courtesy response. Some form of acknowledgement and appreciation for my time would have been appreciated.

Problem broken into three phases:

1. Create a hash-like data structure class that handles get and set.

2. Allow a key to hold many values, with each value having a timestamp. If get receives just the key, return the latest value. If get receives both key and time, return the appropriate value.

3. Modify get to return the closest value with a timestamp lesser than the argument timestamp.