I had two rounds of back-to-back interviews. The first round was for resume, behavioral questions (BQ), and basic Computer Science (CS) questions. The interviewer was friendly.

The second round was really awful, and I don't even feel like the interviewer wanted to hire anyone. Below is the detailed process:

I was given a problem with a very complicated input format, which would require a lot of "dirty work" in code. It felt like a combination of two questions, leading me to write about 70 lines of code in Java within a non-friendly IDE (CodeSignal).

The interviewer also seemed unprepared for this question. She didn't try to explain it, even though the description itself was unclear and very long. There was also a mismatch between the function signature she asked me to write and the description of the input and output.

I asked several times, and she just pointed me back to the problem statement.

The entire implementation phase was limited to 30 minutes, including writing my own test cases, running the code, and debugging. This started from the moment the problem was shown to me. For a problem with such complicated input structures (four layers of a Java container, which was very convoluted) and requiring 70 lines of code at first attempt, it's almost impossible to read, understand, and write everything within 30 minutes. This doesn't even account for the confusion caused by the interviewer and the unclear problem statement, which cost me extra time just to confirm what was being asked.

I also need to complain about the interviewer, as she didn't seem to understand my code. She wrongly accused part of my code, specifically a Java 8-style sort with a lambda comparator, of being incorrect. She seemed to barely know about Java 8 and told me that this part of the comparator should return a String, as that's what the problem asked for, while in reality, a Java Comparator can only return integers.

I need to clarify the interview timelines. We spent 15 minutes on the introduction. After about 30 minutes of coding, I was asked to stop and not write any more. There were almost 15 minutes left in the one-hour interview, giving me no chance to write further.

If the interviewer felt she could implement this long question with so many confusions on the first try, she must be able to implement such a feature in daily work within 30 minutes, including discussions with a Product Manager (PM) and writing unit tests.

Hopefully, people seeing this will try to avoid or be careful when interviewing with Zoom, as they expect you to implement features in 30 minutes.

Given a Map<String, Map<String, List<List<Long>>>>, output a list of complicated strings.

This problem involves a combination of two LC mediums or a medium and an easy LC problem, resulting in approximately 70 lines of code.