I contacted a recruiter and was promptly set up for phone screens for a full stack developer role at Uber Freight.

There was supposed to be just one phone screen, but they scheduled one more to see if I was a good fit.

I was interviewing for a full stack role, but I was interviewed by a back-end engineer first. They felt I had strong front-end skills and so got a front-end engineer to interview me. However, the front-end engineer never asked me any front-end questions – it was just a plain algorithmic interview.

Unlike Lyft and Airbnb, I liked how the interviewers asked questions beyond just programming. They tried to get to know you, explained the role and skills required, and discussed future projects.

I think I messed up the second phone screen, as my solution for the longest palindromic substring did not work for even-length palindromes. I had 5 minutes to fix it and buckled under pressure.

The code worked well for odd-length palindromes. However, my approach was correct, and I even provided ideas on how we could fix the bug, but it was not sufficient.

Convert a string with digits into a literal representation of the number.

For example: 1001 becomes 'one thousand one'.

This is a typical programming question asked by young 20-year-olds at these companies: the longest palindromic substring.