Facebook Phone screening Rejected
Anonymous User
1560

The question I had that was horribly explained to me.
The exact question was given a hashtag validate it with a given array

#hashbagtag => true
['ash', 'hash', 'bag', 'tag']
#tagragbag => false

After some comments a user found the question on leetCode https://leetcode.com/problems/word-break/.

I think it was completely irresponsible to ask this type of question in a phone screening interview because phone screening are to showcase how I solve problems and communicate so they would usually be easy-med type of problems. Especially since the recruiter said they expected me to finish two questions with optimal solutions. But I never seen that question, after looking at the question and solving it, I was really upset when I figured out that most people consired this question to be close to or a hard question or need a good base of doing the question before, which complelety is out of reach for a phone screening maybe probably for a E4 position. I would completely expect this question in an onsite interview where I got more time than 45 mins and the interviewer wasn't late.

In retrospect, I should of asked for the interviewer to write down the actual question, and for that person to provide more test cases. I was so sad when I spent 25+ mins just asking questions about the question, trying to clarify and understand what was expected. At the last 10 mins I just gotten the information I wanted out of the interviewer. I knew probably after the 25 min mark full well that I probably failed my interview because of the bad question and bad interviewer. Especially since its a PHONE SCREENING which the point of it is to ask questions that aren't vague, to get a feel if the canditate is even comptent enough to actually go through the interview process. Not ask just a vague question on first one of course. It didn't even give me a chance to answer another question. Not to mention that the interviewer was also 10 mins late cutting into my time to actually do the interview. I won't give up but I think it's so unlucky of me to gotten an interviewer like the one I did, had nerves through the roof since it was my dream job, and I was so close to asking the interviewer to give me another question. But I will take this and learn from this experience. Hopefully if you read this and your prepping for your phone screening and get lucky enough to my interviewer. You at least got a head start.

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