Status: New bootcamp grad, have done one freelance job and currently looking for fulltime position
Location: Los Angeles, CA

Technical Phone Screen - I
Decode String -https://leetcode.com/problems/decode-string/

Experience:
Interviewer was a little late and for some reason we were't able to set up a Zoom call, even when I gave her the link she still couldn't enter the room as a host. Guess she didn't get the right info from the recruiter, but HackerRank still worked and we instead communicated through a regular phonecall. First started about asking about myself, projects and hardest aspects of those projects. We then when into the technical question in Java.

I first pseudo coded what I wanted to do in order to get the correct results and asked for examples on how the outcome should look like. Interviewer gave me a non-nested example and then a heavily nested example. She really stressed on about the heavily nested example which led to problems in this interview.

I went with a recursive approach similiar to approach 3 in the solutions for decode string I included notes within my code and explained my thought process to the interviewer as I coded. But the interviewer kept asking how my solution would deal with the heavily nested example and she didn't believe it would work as I explained how I would append to the stringbuilder. She kept saying I needed to have the index included in the parameters and not just the string when i recalled my function and why I kept inputting the whole string as a parameter instead of doing something like a substring from where brackets opened and closed. I explained to her the process why we didn't need to do that and on how the index was being used to keep track of the placement on the string and how we were we keeping track of what was a number, a letter and a open or closed bracket. After this she said she still didn't understand how it would work on solving the heavily nested example and was insistent changing the function to how she noted before with index included as a parameter and using substrings.
I eventually felt peer pressured enough from her that I tried to find another way to solve the problem using her advice. As I believed if I don't take her advice I might show that I am not cooperative enough and hurt my chances. So we worked on a solution together and eventually we ran out of time.

The last part of the interview was asking questions about Bloomberg and her team, and I was told I would hear back within a week. After the interview closed, I tested my original code I saved on a notepad file onto VS Code and it worked even with the heavily nested example. I sent an email to the recruiter telling her what happened, how the original code worked and if they could show the recruiter the original code solution that I attached to the email, for her to test herself, in case it changes anything about the selection process. I also included my notes and psuedo code in the attachment like before. Didn't get a reply from the recruiter if they did show to interviewer or not. Got rejection letter 5 days later (today).

The nested example looked similiar to this. 3[a]2[ed3[fg]h]k -> "aaaedfgfgfghedfgfgfghk"