The interview process began with a 30-minute initial call with HR, followed by a 1-hour technical screen. This would have been followed by a three-round in-person interview, but I was turned away after the first round of the technical screening.

The questions themselves were very easy, though the text introduction to the prompt was quite long.

I believe I failed simply because I read the prompt aloud, which took a considerable amount of time. Reading aloud prevented me from finishing the third part of the question. Each part of the question was outstandingly easy, and I completed them very quickly when it came to writing the code, with only a small amount of debugging required.

It was also clear that I would have quickly finished the third section of the question. However, they cut me short to ensure there was time for me to ask them questions.

Given the high volume of applicants, I am sure the cutoff was simply that I did not finish, even though I made it clear that I actually code quickly and have a bias towards hitting 'run.' They have to select from such a large pool somehow, and it is much faster for them to see that I didn't finish rather than try to interpret my behavior and determine if I am a good programmer.

String formatted list of booleans, along with an integer denoting when to stop in the list.

Booleans contribute to the total score in an opposite fashion before and after the boolean.

Get the total score.

Get the best possible score.

Make string parsing more complicated and get the best possible score.