Tech Interview madness
April 6, 2025 | Categories: programmingSo I finally got to the 4th interview which is the programming assessment in this case. I am so ready for this, I can jump rope 100 miles with Linked Lists. I can Graph the inside of your Grandma's house and locate every dead insect or lost small hard candy. I can slide windows, double point till I offend your mother. I am so ready!
After 35 minutes of discussing work experience.. for the third time. I'm finally given the technical coding exercise. Write a function that takes in a sentence and counts the average words. I ask some questions and explain how a hashmap would make quick work of this as it's O(1) once I did O(n) across all characters of the sentence. I knock it out in a couple minutes while thinking to myself "This is it? Could it really be this easy?" I execute the code while throwing in the brown fox sentences in it and have it output the average counts on words. I write a couple asserts at the bottom and explain my output expectations on these inputs. Then I run the entire thing... The interviewer seems confused... they ask me some questions and say their expectation for the output was something else. I ask some questions and we seem to be thinking of this differently. I find that he posted the question in zoom chat and I tell them to allow me to reread it real fast. As I'm reading they begins giving me the answer.. this is when I realize I misheard the question entirely and what they were asking was the average word LENGTH of a sentence. By this time they are already giving me a somewhat solution as they appeared to be frustrated by this time. "I don't know Python, but before you return the output you might want to find your denominator and numerator." FRREAAAAK! I think to myself. This still is INSANELY easy! I Erase all code and rewrite it quickly now knowing what they asked. As well as their hastiness to give me some answers.
I get the email the next day... Sorry we're going with another candidate.
I never complain about doing leetcode for interviews. I feel like I can problem solve good enough to work through em and have done 100's of leet codes and kata's for fun anyways over my time. However, I let myself get carried away with this easy question and probably didn't talk through it as much as I should? I felt like I was talking non-stop and there was plenty of time to be caught that I was misunderstanding their verbal request. Was it cause I did it in Python? I asked before hand if they were fine with Python as it's basically pseudo code and easy to talk through it. Besides, who can't read python when you're not doing any tricky for comprehensions and sticking to simple loops and variable assignments?
It didn't matter. I made this simple mistake and after a month of interviews with several of the team members and the prep with the company and knowing someone on the team that I actually had taught how to program speaking in their other ear. It still wasn't enough for this stranger who had their set expectation and I just didn't quite meet it.
My mistakes here were I allowed things to get too casual with them and made it more of a game. I should have stopped and typed out what I thought I heard them ask then reread it back. I should have just stuck with writing in the language they had expectations with, in this case it was Scala. Don't bash ;P
A lesson learned in reading people a little better. Also they offered me to interview with a separate team, but at this point I was already put off by them. I tried to explain my mistake, but got a response that I knew already sealed the deal. They were quickly done with me and wanted to get back to work and not talk to this clown. So I thanked them for their time and started back on my own projects in creating a Package manager TUI for VoidLinux in GoLang.