I applied for the labs program. I had an initial HR phone call with the recruiter, and then I completed a 24-hour coding challenge. I also had to submit a coding sample. Since I was out of touch with C++, it was a little tough initially, but honestly, it was a simple problem.

Then, I had a tech interview with an engineer over the same platform where I did the coding challenge. Since I was freaking out about the coding question for the tech interview, I completely forgot to review some projects on my resume. When she asked about them, it was embarrassing because I did these projects a few years back.

The coding question was pretty simple. It took a little while initially, as you have to think about it thoroughly for a second. When she asked how to optimize, I gave a good answer by just talking about it theoretically, but when trying to code it, I struggled, and time ran out.

I had a bunch of questions prepared, but since she was clearly not happy with my attempt to code what we talked about for optimizing, she tried to end it quickly. She said, "If you have any more questions, you can ask your recruiter." She then added, "Well, I hope you had fun. Have a good day," and quickly ended the conversation.

Based on her reaction, I could tell I'm not moving on. Of the few questions I did ask, she kept chuckling when she tried to answer. Now, even though I didn't do well in coding a more optimized solution, it definitely felt like she was chuckling because she was thinking, 'Yeah, there's no way he's going to work here.' The chuckling was definitely unprofessional on her part.

The coding challenge was to print all combinations you can create from a vector of a vector of strings. It also involved finding all valid strings you can create from a list of letters you have.