The interview process typically involves several stages:

First, you will be contacted by a technical recruiter who will ask basic, common interview and application questions, such as "Tell me about your experience," "Why are you looking to join Target," and "What compensation expectations do you have?"

Second, you will have an hour-long interview with a senior or lead engineer who will ask questions about the technical specifications of the role and your related experience.

Third, you will have a ninety-minute interview with another senior or lead engineer who will conduct a pair programming exercise. You will be given a mock application with unfinished features or bugs. Afterwards, you will be asked a variety of technical and experience-related questions.

Fourth, you will have a forty-five-minute interview with a manager who will focus on soft skills.

Fifth, you will have a panel interview with technical questions. This interview includes a coding exercise with a "gotcha" question.

Research consistently shows that "gotcha" questions provide little to no indication of an applicant's ability, as the situations they present are unlikely to occur in real life. The applicant is already nervous with people watching them code, and the "gotcha" question often lacks context to the business's processes.

I performed extremely well in all interviews except for the "gotcha" question because it was flawed and did not even reflect a realistic data set. My advice is that if you are given this question, ask for a more realistic coding exercise, or consider ending the interview.

Using these arrays, return how many times a pair of numbers occurs in the array.

Examples:

• [(3, 2), (3, 2), (2, 1), (1, 2)] -> 2
• [(3, 1), (4, 5)] -> 0
• [(1, 2), (5, 6), (6, 5)] -> 1