A recruiter from Scale AI reached out to me, and I was interested.

I went through a technical phone screen, which was done through HackerRank.

On the plus side, you get to run your code, so you can write tests. On the minus side, the interview question is about playing cards, so there’s nothing elegant about the solution — you just have to go through all the cases.

Given a poker hand of five regular playing cards, detect whether there are any straights, flushes, full-houses, etc. (There were various types of poker hands).

Now detect the same poker hands, but with the addition of Jokers, which are considered wildcards (i.e., any card).