I applied on their career portal. They contacted me by email to set up an interview.

Initially, upon joining the interview, the interviewer was a bit standoffish and looked like he didn't like me. For context, the position was for a frontend developer role with React and Node.js, and the interviewer was a Java developer. This was about the worst possible person to be giving a frontend interview.

As such, the questions had nothing to do with either React or Node.js. Instead, they asked me to implement a data structure and solve a pretty easy problem in JavaScript.

I was asked to implement a stack, which I had no experience with. You would obviously never need to write a stack in JavaScript, and if you did, it would be called a queue and be used for a totally different purpose.

I had to ask the interviewer to explain to me what a stack is. After that, I was able to code it in a few minutes, but it had a few bugs due to type conversion, which took me another few minutes to debug and fix.

I was then asked if I could describe the algorithmic complexity using Big O notation, which I said I could not. Then, I was asked to make an optimized version of the stack. I rewrote it slightly to reduce the complexity to what I believed to be O(n). The interviewer gave a nod of approval but looked unimpressed.

The second question was more interesting and challenging, but I was able to solve it quickly. The task was to find the first duplicate in a sequence, for which I wrote a pretty inefficient map-reduce (two loops). Keep in mind I am interviewing for a React position, so a map-reduce would be what you would expect in React, not a while loop. In Node.js, I would opt for a while loop, though many JavaScript developers would prefer the functional style of map/reduce over the speed of the while loop.

Again, the interviewer asked me to describe the complexity and improve my solution if I could. To me, this was the pivotal moment of the interview, and I just said, "No, I don't think I can."

The final question was, "Why do you want to work here and why should we hire you?" I didn't give a meaningful answer.

1. Implement a Stack

2. Write a function to find the first duplicate in a sequence

3. Why do you want to work here?

4. Why should we hire you?