I had a phone call with the recruiter, followed by a phone screen. Unfortunately, I did not make it past the phone screen. It was exactly as other candidates described.

The challenge involved a significant amount of text to read through to understand the coding task and its three to four parts. It took me a while to sort through the pasted text to grasp the requirements.

Key takeaways:

• Read very quickly, as the interviewers expect you to move at a rapid pace.
• I was moving quickly, and the interviewer instructed me to proceed to the next part. I verbalized all the edge cases, but the recruiter later noted that I hadn't coded them. Therefore, I suggest coding out all edge cases.

Interviewers definitely care about coding edge cases and want you to solve the problem as fast as possible. My advice is to practice coding solutions within 15-20 minutes so that you have a 10-minute buffer when you're in a stressful interview setting.

The question itself was not tricky; the formatting was the primary hurdle that could trip you up.

Iterate through an array. Based on the information within the array, be able to tell something. This is not complicated; it's basically an array of numbers, kind of like the lightbulb question.