I received a preparatory phone call from a recruiter, followed by a technical phone interview the next week.

The technical phone interview was conducted on HackerRank. The question presented was of medium difficulty.

I came very close to solving the problem but made an off-by-one error at the very end. When I asked for a little guidance, I was told I could run the code on HackerRank, which wasn't particularly helpful.

After the interview, I couldn't help but feel discouraged. It seemed as though the interviewer silently observed my struggle without offering any hints or feedback, especially since I was so close to a solution and felt only a little guidance was needed.

For future candidates, I hope Zillow will either have interviewers offer a hint or two during the interview or provide the coding problem directly from HackerRank without an interviewer. This would allow candidates to focus solely on the problem without the added pressure of interacting with an interviewer. I hope this feedback is considered.

A couple of days after the interview, I received the rejection email.

It involved traversing a 2D matrix in a specific way.