I spoke with the recruiter, who then scheduled a technical phone screen with the hiring manager.

I had a pleasant chat with the hiring manager, where he asked me about my previous projects and other aspects of my resume.

We moved on to CoderPad, where he pasted a question and told me he expected a working solution within 30 minutes.

I solved the question and even printed out the solution. He confirmed it was correct, although he did mention it was "one of the ways to do it." Nonetheless, the solution I provided worked and seemed to function well. For 30 minutes, I believed I had performed well by delivering a working solution.

As with most technical interviews, managers these days seem to settle for nothing less than a unicorn when it comes to coding. After the interview, I Googled the question to see if there was a solution I had missed. It turns out the question is a known algorithm called Reservoir Sampling, and this was an adaptation of it.

To be fair, after reading the algorithm and its implementation, I realized my provided solution also worked in a similar fashion. However, the hiring manager apparently was looking for me to identify it as a Reservoir Sampling problem.

I was very excited to interview at Twitch, and the hiring manager seemed very nice and humble. He never once pointed out if I was going in the wrong direction or provided hints on how he wanted me to solve the problem.

I wish managers these days did not have such unrealistically high demands from engineers. Instead, they should judge candidates on whether they can produce a working solution. If you only want a coding nerd who knows every algorithm from the Cormen algorithm book, then I wish you the best of luck in the future!

Create a game board (a 2D array) of a particular size, with width and height provided.

For the sake of simplicity, let's assume you have an n x n size 2D array.

Insert k number of enemies randomly into this game board, where k < n * n.

So, you can assume that initially the matrix is full of 1s, and you insert enemies (which are 0s) randomly into the 2D array.