I was contacted by a Facebook recruiter on LinkedIn for my expertise in Android. We conversed on and off over a few weeks, as I travel a lot for business. The recruiter was able to set up a phone-based technical interview that met my scheduling needs. This recruiter was incredibly professional and interpersonal, provided plenty of prep resources, and made me feel like he was really rooting for me. It was awesome!

However, the technical phone interview went poorly. The interviewer introduced himself and immediately asked me a very vague Android question. I feel that I handled my responses well, attempting to narrow down what he was fishing for while demonstrating my adeptness with Android. Yet, I was given very little positive feedback, and he seemed to ask the same question several more times. Apparently, I had no clue what he was asking. At this point, I felt like an item on his to-do list.

He denied the compile and run time capabilities of CoderPad, making for a much more theoretical, text-only based environment. The solution would have to be proven to work via tracing, which wastes time and renders CoderPad pointless in my opinion.

It was difficult enough for me to understand his thick accent that it turned me off to asking clarifying questions during the coding problem. Instead, I felt that I had to voice every thought, which did not allow me to think more deliberately. I became a bit flustered and floundered for a moment, despite the question being relatively simple. I recognized this and had prepared for it by having a whiteboard at the ready. I requested a moment to collect my thoughts and draw on my board. I am a visual person, and there are things that are just more easily drawn than typed out. He declined, telling me to stick to the editor.

At this point, it was game over. Typing my thoughts in the editor was making a mess as I traced my logic over the examples, because the cursor was jumping all over. I believe this was because the editor was technically set to Java, and I should have made a comment block around his question and my typing. I also was not allowed to create a runnable Java class to put my code in. So, I was cut off before long.

I tried to exchange some more pleasantries, but he was clearly done. In any case, I had asked him why he chose Facebook, and I got a dissatisfying answer. I would hazard a guess that he was not nearly as stoked about the mission and impact of Facebook as I am, and I don't even work there!

I think I had most of the main working principles and demonstrated that I could code Java, but the solution was not complete. (To be honest, I think I suffered a small panic attack.) It does not matter if you invented a robot that defeats the Turing Test; the technical interviewer may not care to even read your resume and will shut you down if you do not perform flawlessly. With these tech giants, you won't be hired without a perfect performance.

The recruiter sent me a canned rejection two days later, with no response to my reply. I completely understand and respect the decision to be cut off. But I feel like it took two to make this a waste of everyone's time.

Balance a string with parentheses.

Examples:

• "a(b)" -> "a(b)"
• "(((((" -> ""
• "(()())" -> "(()())"
• ")ab(()" -> "ab()"

This task involves balancing strings containing parentheses.