I was contacted by a Facebook recruiter. It was a really nice and great person to talk to, and I could truly sense that they genuinely wanted me to prepare well and give my best shot.

I was told the phone screen would be a 1-hour interview, structured as follows:

• 15 minutes: 'Tell me about yourself'
• 45 minutes: 'Think aloud, write, and explain your code'
• 5 minutes: 'Ask any questions about Facebook'

The interviewer called 5 minutes late of the scheduled time and started directly with the coding question. He had a very thick accent and took about 15 minutes to explain and clarify the question, which was a reasonably challenging problem.

Fifteen minutes into the interview, he said, "You have 5 minutes more. Do you have any questions for me or about Facebook?"

It felt really rushed, and I had a panic attack. I was terribly disappointed and hung up the interview aghast. I wish I had taken the onsite option for the phone screening.

Implement a regex pattern matching function that returns a boolean value, given a text string and a regex expression. Examples include:

• a.b
• a*
• .*
• abc.*