An internal recruiter reached out for an interview opportunity for a full-stack role at the SF office. After an intro call with the recruiter, I was scheduled for an initial one-hour tech screening interview with one of their Sr. engineers. During the technical screening call, I was asked to code the next generation for Conway's Game of Life. Not much information was provided; the interviewer only provided a link to Wikipedia's article explaining the game. No clear constraints about the game or the code I was supposed to write, so I had to ask for clarifying questions, making sure to take into account edge cases, etc. Once I explained my approach, wrote pseudocode, and explained time and space complexity, I was given the green light to start coding. Once I wrote the code to solve the question, I walked through my code to make sure my approach worked before running the code. I did a walkthrough and it seemed to work as expected. I then ran the code and encountered a couple of bugs, which I was able to solve, and eventually my code correctly generated the expected answer. The interviewer seemed pleased with my answer. I asked if he had any questions or confusions, and he told me everything looked great and the code obviously worked as expected. The last 10 minutes were left for questions.

The next day, the recruiter emailed me back to let me know they would not be moving forward with me to the onsite. No feedback was provided at all. I was confused when I was reading her email, as I was confident I would be moved forward since I solved the problem as expected and even offered some suggestions for improving my algorithm if we had more time. At the end of the interview, we also had a really good conversation, and I was asking really good questions. So I really do not know why I was not moved forward, and not receiving an explanation makes it harder to understand their reasoning.

Code the next generation of Conway's Game of Life. (Prompt was provided through Wikipedia link.)