A recruiter reached out via LinkedIn. After talking about the team and the hiring process, I was scheduled for a technical phone screen. There were two software engineers on the call.

We started off with a problem. I began explaining the way I was planning to solve it. They asked about why I chose a certain data structure and my approach.

After explaining my reasoning, I started coding on a shared screen. Every single line I typed, they interrupted and nitpicked on the syntax (e.g., "you are missing an operator in the for loop"). As I fixed issues and continued, they would ask me why I was doing it a certain way and inquire about the data structure used. They were constantly interrupting the entire time I was typing a line. I was struggling to think with these rapid-fire questions.

Finally, as we were nearing the end of our session, we agreed to stop. They informed me that my approach was correct, but the code needed to be fixed for it to work.

I hope this kind of constant interruption when someone is coding during an interview is not the norm for LinkedIn. At one point, I had to request them to wait for me to complete typing a line before they could ask me another question.

Find the minimum distance between any two given strings from an array of strings.

Example:

{"the", "quick", "brown", "fox", "the"}

Minimum distance between "quick" and "the" = 1