Applied in July and received a response from a recruiter the following day requesting a date for a phone interview. I responded the same day, but it took the recruiter another week and a half to respond. She scheduled a phone screen for two weeks after that.

A fairly standard phone screen was followed by a request for me to upload my unofficial transcripts from university onto my account on their career site. The day after the phone screen, I was set up for a technical interview 10 days later and sent a HackerRank challenge.

The challenge was fairly basic: given four questions in pairs where I picked one question from each pair to complete. I was able to complete one and provide a partial solution for another within the two hours allotted. I had not seen the problems before, so they were fairly entertaining.

The technical interview amounted to going over the two questions from the HackerRank challenge that I had submitted and a basic toy polymorphism/inheritance/can-you-build-this-from-a-spec problem. The interviewer was nice enough, though did not ask much of me beyond asking if I could explain the code I wrote and a solution to the problem for which I provided a partial solution.

I was told that we should move onto the toy problem because the interviewer didn't want to spend too much time on the HackerRank questions, either because he didn't think I could implement my solution in a reasonable time or because he felt my explanation was adequate (I wasn't told which).

When I finished implementing the toy problem, I was asked if I had any questions. I asked how he enjoyed his job and what he does. He didn't seem comfortable responding, instead diverting into a generic explanation of the position I applied for (and by extension, the position he currently holds) and its benefits. He didn't have any questions for me, and seemed to just want to be done with the process.

The following Monday, I sent an email to the recruiter thanking her and my interviewer for the opportunity to interview and stated I looked forward to next steps. I was told that I could check my application's status on my account in their career site. I logged in to find that I was not selected to continue.

The impersonal nature of the entire process, especially how it ended, left a bad taste in my mouth and is responsible for the negative rating for the overall experience.

Write a function that, given a 1-row, 2^n-column matrix containing integers from 1 to 2^n, divides the matrix in two. Then, place the right half of the matrix below the left half. Repeat this process until the matrix is 2^n rows and 1 column, and return the result.