The first call with a recruiter was followed immediately by their standard take-home coding exercises: inserting and deleting from a ternary tree (which they called a tri-nary tree) and converting a string into a long. These were straightforward questions.

I decided to include not only a solution but also unit tests, structured in a way that I would expect to pass a code review for check-in. This isn't my first dev job.

While the code functioned and, as far as I know, was production-quality, I received an email about one day after I submitted the response stating they were not going to ask me in for a screening. This was disappointing, as I have no idea what they were looking for that I didn't do.

I had heard this complaint from other reviewers, but I assumed that they just solved the problem the fastest way. I thought for sure having tests, comment blocks, and code structured for use in an application would impress enough for an interview.

The questions weren't difficult, but obviously, I wasn't able to provide what they were looking for (which they didn't ask for).