I was contacted by HR and scheduled for a Google Hangouts phone interview for the first round. The process went smoothly, but the questions asked were quite vague. It took me a while to understand them and provide lots of examples. This took about 20 minutes, and I had to write code in HackerRank CoderPad.

I finished and wrote numerous test cases, which passed. (I was not given any feedback during the process.) I also explained the optimization.

I believe I did a fair job, but I received a rejection within a couple of hours. I'm unsure how they evaluate candidates. If the expectation is to know the question and code it immediately on the spot, then this is probably not the right company for me.

I take time to think and write the code, as I am not familiar with all problems. I feel this is not expected of engineers these days, who seem to be expected to be "pure coders" and not "thinkers."

Given a pattern and a dictionary, print out all strings that match the pattern.

A character in the pattern is mapped uniquely to a character in the dictionary.

Examples:

1. ("abc" , <"cdf", "too", "hgfdt" ,"paa">) -> output = "cdf"
2. ("acc" , <"cdf", "too", "hgfdt" ,"paa">) -> output = "too", "paa"