Several engineers came to recruit at my university. I didn't feel the process was aimed at finding out about my thought process. The interview seemed more focused on whether I arrived at the correct answer and how quickly I figured it out.

I did figure it out. However, the interviewer was messaging on his/her mobile phone at several times while I was explaining my reasoning. I felt he/she was rude at times, too.

Some friends who interviewed with other recruiters received easier questions and advanced to the second interviews. I searched for the question later online, and my solution was correct and optimal.

Overall, it left a bad taste.

Given two words (start and end) and a dictionary, find the length of the shortest transformation sequence from start to end.

This sequence must adhere to the following rules:

• Only one letter can be changed at a time.
• Each intermediate word must exist in the dictionary.

For example, given:

start = "hit" end = "cog" dict = ["hot", "dot", "dog", "lot", "log"]

From: http://www.programcreek.com/2012/12/leetcode-word-ladder/