Absolute disaster. This is easily my worst interview ever. Avoid the Twilio Mountain View office if you can.

First interviewer made it clear that the role would require long hours and even some weekend work if need be. I'd have to carry my pager everywhere 24/7. Obviously a big red flag.

The technical interviewer was a crazy person with no social skills. Even worse, he rejected the correct solution to his question. The question: Given a word and a dictionary, find the anagrams that exist in the dictionary. I was as thorough as I could be. I discussed from an obvious brute force O(n!) permutation to generate all anagrams and check against the dictionary to the optimal character frequency map for all words of equal length to the supplied word comparison (which is O(n) time and constant space, as the map will never exceed a size of 26). The interviewer wrongly thought it was O(n) space and wanted me to do better. I even suggested the prime number product approach, where each letter would be mapped to a unique prime number, with the danger of overflow for really big words. He did not understand why this would work. We spent the whole time discussing to no avail. When I asked him what he wanted, he would respond with "You tell me" or "Come up with a better solution." In the end, he didn't even tell me what he was looking for, and I was not given the chance to write any code on the board. I think he may have been pushing for the sorting by character's ASCII method, but this is longer/less efficient than the frequency map approach. I was stunned at how such an argumentative fool was employed at a place like Twilio.

The last "technical" interview was a joke. It was through a conference video, and I was given a laptop and asked to fill in the blanks of code written on a text editor. The text editor actually crashed midway because the trial period Twilio was on had expired. Honestly, this interview was just not worthy to be called a technical interview.

I wrote a complaint to HR detailing my experience, but they are useless in these situations. I just had to cut my losses and move on.

1. API integration exercise

2. Given a word and dictionary, find all anagrams of the word in the dictionary

3. Two useless HR interviews over conference video

4. Fill in the code blanks for conference video