A PayPal recruiter reached out to me to take a one-hour HackerRank test that included three medium-difficulty questions. The prompts were all short novels, so understanding each one really cut into development time. They said I could use an IDE, then their test warned that any cheating actions were being forwarded to the hiring team if I alt-tabbed. So, I coded the solution entirely in the browser, which ate away at the timer some more.

I finished two questions and passed the visible test cases, but I needed more time for the third.

A rejection email arrived shortly thereafter. We hadn't even had a conversation or discussed the position yet.

Given an array of strings that represent login or logout times, figure out who signed in for <x amount of time.

Given an array of integers representing items on a shelf, for example [1, 3, 12, 12], re-order them in increasing numbers. This example becomes 1, 3, 12, 12. The prompt for this one was poorly written.

Can't remember the first problem.