I met the recruiter at a school career fair, and one month later, I received an interview invitation. This was for the Programmable Solution Group in Toronto, on Bloor Street, and their primary product is FPGAs. There were two rounds for the interview.

The first round was a one-hour interview with two managers. There were no behavioral questions; they asked how to program prime numbers and find a certain node in a tree. I applied for a software position, but they also asked me some hardware questions about multiplexers.

The second interview process lasted about four hours, and I was interviewed by six seniors. There were no greetings or "how are you today?" Instead, they started with "Do you have any questions for me?" and "Okay, let's start coding."

Questions included:

• Finding the number of islands from a map (LeetCode #200).
• Deleting all occurrences of a certain number in a linked list.
• Finding the maximum subarray sum.
• Trapping rain water (LeetCode #42).
• Designing a chess game.
• Removing several nodes from an unbalanced heap order tree.

Honestly, those questions were pretty standard, and I got all of them. However, what really "qissed" me off is when one manager literally told me, "We are on a financial cut right now. If you do not get this role, don't take it personally."

I was so confused after this interview. Two weeks later, I received a rejection letter. It felt like a waste of tons of time. Honestly, if there was no position available at the start, they should have rejected me in the first round!

Find the number of islands from a map (LeetCode #200 Number of Islands).

Delete all certain numbers in a linked list.

Find the maximum subarray sum.

Trapping water (LeetCode #42).

Design a chess game.

Remove several nodes from an unbalanced heap order tree.