Got contacted by the recruiter. Setup a time to talk, went through the ~100-something slideshow. The recruiter said she was impressed with my skills, set up time to talk with the Hiring Manager. I spoke to the Hiring Manager who was nice to talk to, went over my background and skills in depth.

He was particularly interested in knowing about my AWS experience and how I designed a scalable Metrics collection service. Overall, it was a positive conversation purely on background and experience.

Next up, the Hiring Manager suggested a technical programming phone screen. And I setup some time for it. The phone screen was awkward from the start. I google'd the interviewer's name before the interview and found out that he's the kind who runs blogs on interviewing questions and puzzles. While I particularly detest narrowing down Software Engineering to a bunch of puzzle-type questions, I am well aware of what such kinds of interviewers are after.

I prepped hard and went through Cracking the Coding Interview and other resources. When I saw the interview problem, I just had the gut feel that I could crack this. I went through the edge cases and design ideas meticulously and wrote the code given below.

3 days later, I get an email from the recruiter saying that "my background and skills do not match". I tried to follow up but did not get concrete feedback. This was very weird, and I felt frustrated since I had already spoken to the Hiring Manager - and he'd okay-ed a phone screen - either the recruiter was lying or I was being used as interview target practice for someone on the team.

For the record, I never heard back from them on what skills they thought I was 'mismatched'. Overall, I think it was a finicky process and a company.

Letter Combinations of a Phone Number.