I didn't sign an NDA, but I didn't make it onsite either.

After submitting my resume, a technical recruiter called to assess where my best fit would be and why I wanted to work at SpaceX.

After that, I was emailed a take-home coding assignment and given two days to complete it. The recruiter mentioned it must be completed within three hours, but there is no real way for them to check that. Still, I did as instructed. The take-home assignment consisted of four sections of soft skill and coding problems.

Once submitted, the recruiter responded five days later stating I had passed. A second recruiter then scheduled a live coding interview round for seven days after that. Communication was great.

The live coding interview was 90 minutes. The interviewer was very nice and gave me the impression he loved his work. It was in three sections:

• Quick question and answers regarding programming (overloading vs. overriding, references vs. pointers, etc.).
• Coding in Google Docs: The algorithm was a binary search to return an index value, and I quickly learned where a gap in my knowledge lay.
• Writing some SQL questions with joins; the interviewer expected MySQL, and I know Oracle SQL (which my resume listed), so he just took what I did at face value. Not a good sign.

Either way, I bombed a simple programming 1 binary search, and there was no saving this interview. Two days later, I received the rejection email.

He mentioned he had worked there for three years on a small team running "the brains of SpaceX" and had never met Elon Musk.

5 soft skill questions asking about a project you worked on and challenges faced.

You are given code to compare an unsorted list of strings from one array to unsorted strings inside another array. If there are matches, then print them out. The given code uses two for-loops with the print statement inside to print matches. You are instructed to optimize.

Imagine we are playing The Price Is Right. First, find the value in the sorted list that matches the item's value. Then, find the value that is next lowest, or just under. Return THAT index.