Initial internal recruiter phone call for about 20 minutes. Standard confirming of experience. Describe your recent background. Recruiter describes company, how teams are split up, etc. Describes the interview process, and that a technical phone screen is next, followed by potential onsite consisting of 4-6 ppl. Nothing unusual.
Technical phone screen was with an engineer and shared coding tool online. Engineer first asked about experience, and after speaking about it in detail for about a minute, he had absolutely no follow up remarks besides "ok". Now let's jump into code. Which is my pet peeve for annoying interviews that care nothing about the candidate or experience or any human aspect and only about solving the upcoming problem in a certain way.
Problem itself was not super complicated. A very specific set of requirements of the algorithm was predefined, and you're given a blank slate to implement it. He mentioned a 30 minute time limit and to talk as you do. It could probably be coded in 15 if you're efficient. The real trouble I had was working in the online coding tool, which was not a native IDE normally used to write code. Sort of expected for "white boarding", but no code-completion, code tips, etc is harder to freehand than I remember. The code needed to compile and run, so I often found myself testing syntax a lot that would have taken seconds to write in the normal IDE. The interviewer said almost nothing for 30 minutes, a few words here or there, but no discussion. Overall I got about 98% of the way to completing the question, but got stuck on a simple function I couldn't get to work in this online coding tool to tie it together and print the solution. It would have been trivial in the IDE, but for some reason kept getting errors in the tool. I would have expected the interviewer to just offer a tip to get around it, but the interview ultimately was about getting an optimal solution with no tips in the allotted time, using this annoying code tool. Time ended, I told him the trivial step it would take to finish, and that was it.
Perhaps they needed that perfect working solution without exception. Perhaps I got hung up on solving the problem in the obvious manner that I missed some optimal shortcut I was supposed to find to actually pass this challenge.
Generic email arrived 2 days later thanking me, but passing on next steps.
