I was contacted by a recruiter on LinkedIn and scheduled an initial screening call where we discussed my experience and the work of their company.

This was followed by a one-hour live coding interview. The interviews went well, and the interviewers were patient and supportive throughout the process. I felt I performed well and solved the DSA problem they presented, step by step.

However, I ended up being rejected.

They provided detailed feedback about my rejection, stating that I needed more proficiency in the programming language (I chose Kotlin) and that I should have used better functions, specifically higher-order functions.

While I would have understood if I hadn’t done well or failed to solve the problem, I had completed it successfully, explaining every detail and arriving at an optimized solution. It felt a bit unreasonable to be rejected based on my language usage, especially since I was coding without an editor. I don’t understand why companies set such unrealistic expectations!

The only things I liked were the interviewers and their detailed review of the rejection, unlike other companies that just send a standard template of rejection.

Stings and n-gram based questions.