I mass-applied to a position at the end of September, and also asked a person or two for referrals. The strange thing is that the referrals all went nowhere, and the one I applied to cold is the one that moved forward to an interview.
The interviewer was pretty laid-back, maybe it's the company culture. They asked me what times I could interview, then disappeared for three or four days. Eventually the interview was confirmed for early October.
The phone screen was one round with two interviewers. I got a phone number lookup question (find the known words that match a phone number) and a shortest word distance question. Both of them already appeared in other people's interview write-ups.
The phone number problem: you are given a bunch of words, and the letters on the phone keypad, then given a new number and asked which of the known words it could correspond to.
The shortest word distance problem: you have a list of words, and the input is two words, and you return the shortest distance between their indices.
Both were easy. They asked about time complexity. The interviewers were pretty nice. One of them did most of the talking and asking, and the other one just said they had no questions.
We started with self-introductions from all three of us and a few lines of small talk, then went straight into the problems. No project deep dive and no behavioral questions. I answered both problems almost instantly, then asked one or two reverse behavioral questions, and that was it, done.
It took a week after the interview before they followed up to tell me I passed the phone screen and wanted to schedule an onsite.
Hoping for good luck at the onsite. I was a casualty of a power struggle at my previous company, and I've been back in the job-search sea for three months now. I'm emotionally exhausted.
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