The interview process was completely broken.

A recruiter reached out to me, and we discussed our backgrounds. Following that, they mentioned they would get back to me after speaking with the engineering team to set up interviews.

I followed up with the recruiter about a week later and received an automated rejection letter. Subsequently, a couple of months later, the recruiter contacted me again to set up an initial call.

I sent them our email thread where we had already gone over my background and they had sent me a rejection letter. The recruiter clarified that the system had malfunctioned and set up an actual technical interview for me the following week.

The technical screen involved a standard dynamic programming problem, lifted directly from LeetCode. Luckily, I had seen it before.

I presented an algorithm to the interviewer, first writing up the recurrence relation and then using tabulation to optimize it. I implemented the algorithm and wrote varied tests that covered edge cases, as well as positive and negative scenarios. Towards the end, I discussed the time and space complexity of my solution, highlighting the advantages of using tabulation for that particular problem. The interviewer seemed satisfied.

About three business days later, I received the exact same automated rejection letter that the recruiter sent me the first time – no feedback, just the automated letter. I sincerely hope this was not sent in error again; otherwise, they should consider testing their hiring tool.

Regardless, it was a bad experience. The recruiter messed up the first time and then, the second time, provided no feedback at all.

NDA, a standard dynamic programming question.