I applied online and was contacted by a recruiter who then scheduled a call to go over the interview process and other details about the particular role and team. The recruiter was very helpful in getting my technical phone interview scheduled within a couple of days, as I was actively interviewing with other companies as well.

The technical phone interview was with the Hiring Manager. For the first 10 minutes, he asked questions about my resume and previous experience.

Then he asked me to share my screen and use any IDE of my choice to solve a coding problem. The problem was pretty straightforward. Initially, I solved it using recursion. Then I pointed out that it could be improved by using dynamic programming (additional memory) and wrote the code for that. After that, he suggested that I could use even less memory. I thought about it and modified my solution to achieve that.

I noticed more than a few times that the interviewer was looking at his laptop screen, smiling, and wasn't attentive. Many times I had to check with him if he was able to hear me and had to repeat my answers.

It was almost time, and he had an additional question. I mentioned that I should use the earlier recursive approach to solve this. I repeated this statement twice, and finally, when the interviewer heard me, he said, "Oh, I think you can use the recursive approach you used earlier to solve this." To which I responded, "That's what I said just now."

It was almost time, and he said it was fine not to code, as it was an additional question and he got the idea I was suggesting.

I received an email from the recruiter after 2 days stating they would not be moving ahead with my application. I emailed back asking for any feedback or reason, but never heard back.

It was disappointing to get rejected even though I was able to answer all the questions correctly.

Total number of ways to climb N stairs if you can climb 1 or 2 steps at any point.