Q: How would you find all the words from list of words for a given single character. You can preprocess the strings and memory is not an issue. A: I immediately started thinking of tries but since this was a character it couldnt work. The interviewer wasnt working with me. She asked to get a brute force first. I was like okay and gave here the brute force. Then I asked her if the strings were ascii. SHe said sure. So I just used a hashmap of all 26 characters with each key having all the words associated with it. I said this is O(n) to process but later retrievals will be 0(1) since memory wasnt a issue. She said ya this is the best one can do. Q: String to int (Really??) A: Typical conversion using char - '0' and then using a multiplier while iterating. This was so hard to explain given I was trying to repeat the code I had written. It was so stupid I couldnt believe what I was doing. She was silent and then said how would you test it. I gave her all the test scenarios I could think of. Again silence. Finally we finished early and she was like do you have any questions. I asked a bunch but she wasnt in the mood to answer so I was like okay thanks for your time. Two later typical email "Impressed with your background..blah blah" reject. This was my first interview as a practice for other bigger companies so I am not complaining and would have never moved forward but this was pretty laughable. The interview process does smell of a low funded startup who have no clue what they are doing especially based on the questions I asked and the replies I got. No answer to what future products might look like. No answer to why not move from spring to something else. No answer to how do you monetize your users. Really disappointed by the company and dont see how long can they stay this way. There is a reason no one is excited about glassdoor and their rating justifies it.