I was contacted by a recruiter and sent a 60-minute take home coding challenge to be completed in two weeks. This challenge was not looking for correctness or necessarily optimization, but more readability and good design practices. I was genuinely excited about this challenge, as it greatly differs from the industry standard of only '100% passing, perfectly optimized' code is accepted. I am an engineer with two years industry experience, and I spent nearly 10 days straight reading up on the best design, naming, and architectural practices of industry standards of coding. Luckily the problem turned out to be quite easy, and I finished in the allotted time. I made sure to clearly name, label, and comment each and every function and variable with crystal clear descriptions, names, and meanings. I modularized the program to have near perfect interaction given the components. I even provided a driver function with a description on how to run it with a simple test case.
However, after all of this I was denied a phone interview.
As I said, I was genuinely excited about this interview, with their emphasis on writing clean and readable code. Yet they did not seem to uphold that standard. When I asked the recruiter for feedback, I was ghosted.
Just for fun I copied my code into an IDE after submission to test on some sample test cases and my code past every single one of them. Very strange process.
