I received a coding challenge from a recruiter and completed it a few days later. I sent follow-up emails to the recruiter for two weeks afterward with no response. Several more weeks passed before a recruiter sent a request for an interview.

The interviewer initially said, "You can make the code as messy as it needs to be to work; I can understand it." They kept interrupting me as I was explaining my approach to understanding the problem, stating that what I was saying or doing was unnecessary. After I solved the problem, they complained that the answer was "too if-elsey."

The interviewer then edited my code themselves to add extra return statements and additional "else" clauses. They told me I should have saved a boolean for clauses that were checked twice. They complained about how messy the code was, reneging on what they had initially said.

Given an existing function that takes a regex string and a word string and returns whether the word string matches the regex in the regex string (i.e. fn("a.c", "abc") will return true), add the regex asterisk operator (*) functionality.