The first phone screening was about discussing the position, previous experience, and mostly checking if basic required skills matched.

The second was a phone screening with programming questions. I was asked two questions to code on CoderPad. Both were related to dynamic programming.

• The first was longest common prefix.
• The second was finding the maximum sum of non-adjacent elements in an array.

I was able to solve the first question with a sub-optimal complexity. I was also able to solve the second question with some help from the interviewer. The quality of the questions was good. However, I was surprised that despite solving both questions, I received a rejection. HR did not specify the reason. If they were looking for the most optimal solution, the interviewer could have asked me to do that, instead of settling on some sub-optimal solution.

Longest common prefix problem.

Maximal sum of non-adjacent elements of an array.