I was contacted by a recruiter via LinkedIn.

The recruiter set up an initial phone call with me, then scheduled a technical phone screen with an engineer.

Prior to the interview, I was given 2-3 weeks to prepare and was provided materials by the recruiter to study. This included practice problems on LeetCode and CareerCup.

I referenced Glassdoor interviews and also purchased "Cracking the Coding Interview" and various algorithms textbooks to brush up on my knowledge (since it has been a while since I have been out of school).

The first phone interview went okay. It was done through CoderPad, and the interviewer asked me two coding questions. The interviewer was very helpful and responsive, which made it easy to bounce ideas off of and get confirmation that I was heading in the right direction.

About 4-5 days later, I received a call from my recruiter to schedule a follow-up phone screen. Again, I was given about 2-3 weeks to prepare.

The second phone interview, also done through CoderPad, did not go as well. The interviewer only asked me one question and was not as responsive as the first, which made it a little trickier to tell if I was heading in the right direction.

I struggled to articulate my thoughts, so there were some awkward moments of silence that made me panic. I did not finish implementing the question. Ultimately, I think that was my downfall, as I received a rejection email about 6 days later.

Practicing various medium-hard problems on LeetCode and "Cracking the Coding Interview" definitely helped, but getting more practice articulating my thoughts out loud would have helped me further. I am also still kind of rusty on various data structures/algorithms, so spending extra time understanding those would have also helped.

Kth Largest Element in an Array (LeetCode)

Find the Celebrity (LeetCode)

Given a binary tree, find the length of the longest path between two leaf nodes.