My interviewer showed up on time for the video call, and we started with a problem on a coding site I had never used before. It was pretty clunky.

He was interviewing me from China; it was night for me over in California. I confirmed with him that I understood the problem, but there were lots of gotchas with the half-assembled coding environment that made debugging hard. A lot of time was spent talking out my solution, and as we were getting toward the end of the interview, he revealed to me that I was solving the wrong problem.

At first, I hadn't even seen the problem description. When I did, I just glanced at it really quickly and confirmed with him that I understood it. Forty minutes into the interview, I realized that I was doing the wrong problem. Every time I asked him if I understood it correctly, he said "yes."

I quickly threw something together that looked good to me and him, but was not the right answer. After being on the call for over an hour, I called it.

Apparently, he's an Android developer who doesn't know Kotlin at all, so my code was foreign to him. There were no Android questions, nothing to do with my day-to-day as an Android developer, no Kotlin, just an algorithms question that wasn't even communicated clearly. If I had slowed down and ignored everything he said to just read and reread the prompt, I'd be in better shape.

He was a really nice interviewer; I felt like he was in my corner. But he does not have enough English experience to truly answer any question in an interview. Because of this, I kept trying to understand him, and he would try to answer again, but I never really understood what he was saying.

From the other Glassdoor interview reviews here, I had heard it was a bad experience. And it was bad, but I knew they didn't have it together going into it, so it wasn't a letdown when it was a disaster. I was expecting it, but I still wanted to put my best foot forward, as everyone's experience is unique. The experience was a valuable one, and it showed me how little TikTok cares.

What I thought it was: Given a 2D character array, determine if a word is in it (like a crossword).

What it actually was: Given a 2D character array, determine if a word is in it, but not necessarily in a straight line, and each letter may not be used more than once.