The initial technical interview was set up by a recruiter who reached out to me. It was a 45-minute interview via Zoom. It began on time, and the interviewer asked if I had anything more to say than what was on my resume. I told him about the current work I am doing, and then we moved on to the coding interview.

It was a LeetCode Medium question. I hadn't seen it before, so I walked the interviewer through my thinking and approach. I started writing the code on CoderPad, and when I tried to execute it, I had trouble running the code. I tried many times but wasn't able to get it running. The issue was syntactical, and the error messages weren't intuitive enough for me to understand that it was a syntax issue. Nor was the interviewer able to point it out. So, at the end, the interviewer agreed the logic was right but also said it was fine that the code didn't run. How did I know it was a syntax error? I pasted the code as is into IntelliJ and found out the issue in seconds. I ran the same code after correcting the syntax on LeetCode, and it beat 98% of answers. So, yeah, I messed up on syntax. Sorry, but I am not sorry.

However, from here, my experience dipped. They did not respond back with an update after almost 10 days of the interview. I emailed them multiple times, but there was no response. The least they could do is say they are not moving forward or at least provide a timeline for the same. But no, they just ignored all the emails, even though I sent them about 2-3 times. For me, that is the extreme height of unprofessionalism.

First, thank you for rejecting a candidate for getting the syntax wrong, and second, thank you for showing that you don't care about your candidates' time. If I can keep even one person away from this company, I will consider my job done here.

Tell me something interesting that you worked on.