I set up a phone screen for a software engineer interview. The interviewer called me and gave me a question to write the algorithm in Java. The question was along the lines of allocating and deallocating the ID of an API host. Since the interviewer generally said 'that looks reasonable' when I was writing code, I thought I was on the right path.

Although the recruiter said she would get back to me in a day or two, I didn't hear back until I pinged them. Their response was that they don't want to move forward.

I understand that companies like these receive a lot of applications, but I was expecting them to respond along those lines if I had messed up the interview. It felt like they wasted my time, and based on the interview feedback, they lacked transparency. It's probably not a company I would work for.

The question was along the lines of allocating and deallocating the ID of an API host. Allocation happens when the server comes online, and deallocation happens when the server goes offline or crashes.