I had a very good experience with the recruiting department. Everything seemed great until I arrived for a live coding challenge interview.

The challenge was poorly presented and worded, apparently copied and pasted from a text file into HackerRank. To make matters worse, the algorithm had several complicated "gotchas" and did not conform to HackerRank's usual testing patterns.

This was quite frustrating since I was told to familiarize myself with HackerRank before taking the test. By the time I was able to figure out what the question actually was, the interview was over.

I've taken a lot of algorithm challenges over the years, but this is the first one I've ever failed. I can understand evaluating skills with a coding challenge, but this just felt like a puzzle meant to purposely confuse candidates without any clear purpose.

Was given a brute-force algorithm puzzle with several caveats.