It was a technical phone screen with an engineer, where I shared my screen. The question was pretty interesting, about allocating and deallocating server IDs. It has been posted many times on Glassdoor, and it looks like they only use this question for interviews.

However, the bottom line is I solved the question and wrote test cases. One test case failed, and I went back and fixed the issue to get it working. By the time I finished coding, it was a full-fledged, working solution, and all test cases passed. The interviewer was quite friendly throughout and seemed genuinely interested in how I was solving the problem. Overall, I really liked that they used a real-world problem instead of things like "reverse a binary tree" or bit manipulation. I was pretty much sure that they would invite me for an onsite after such a great interview experience.

However, next week, when I pinged the recruiter, they got back with some obscure reason for rejection. I am still wondering what went wrong. Are they even hiring, or was this just a fake interview? I felt like I completely wasted my time.

Later, I saw on Glassdoor that another candidate had the same experience: the same server allocation/deallocation problem, all test cases passed, and still a rejection. I mean, you'd think that if you're able to write good code within the given time constraint that passes test cases, that's probably good to get an onsite (it wasn't even a hire/no-hire call), but I guess not! Only a waste of time for me.

Allocate/deallocate servers