This was for a Ruby position for their Dublin offices.

First of all, a phone call from HR which went really well, then a coding exercise over a Skype call with screen sharing. I couldn't get after that since I received a message from HR stating:

"The feedback was that although you had a good high-level approach to solve the problem and wrote tests, you had a lot of issues with programming in Ruby (for example, spent a lot of time searching documentation to find methods on arrays to solve sub-problems)."

My problem was that I never had this kind of interview, so I was pretty much nervous about it. In my daily job, I work with 3 different languages: Swift, Java, and Ruby. Although I did spend some time looking for the indexOf method from Ruby, which is include?, it is not that I didn't get the problem right. I was confused at this point since I thought companies searched for people who can solve problems.

In any case, I don't know what's considered "a lot" of time since I must have spent a minute or so searching in Ruby's Array class documentation on Google (which I was encouraged to do when I don't remember something).

I think the main problem with my interview is that my interviewer was just another Software Engineer and not a manager or someone who has "people skills." I approached the problem in the correct way, I wrote test cases for it, but I forgot a method from Ruby.

And last but not least, tell me about someone who doesn't Google things. I thought all developers do that, but it seems doing that is against the rules. It is not that I Googled how to solve the problem.

Honestly, I felt disappointed from their reply and I honestly believe their hiring process is a little bit broken.

I hope Zendesk doesn't take this review the wrong way; it is just my opinion on how things went. If their response was a way to tell me "we had a better guy," then they should have said that.

Write a simple cipher that will take a string and replace each letter in the range a-z with the corresponding character 13 steps along the alphabet.