One of the most bizarre interviews ever.
First off — never had any job application ask me for my SAT score. Why is this a thing? Anyways, submitted my application, got reached out by HR for a quick phone screen, which then became an on-site interview fairly quickly.
On-site interview was just an interesting experience. I got a tour of the office space, which is what seemed to be an abandoned warehouse, and met up with the CTO and another engineer who chatted about the role. They had physical copies of my resume and asked me about some projects I had worked on. It did not feel like an interview.
Next, they gave me a laptop and locked me in a room to solve 2 coding problems in 2 hours. The first one was fairly easy, can't remember it much because it was a breeze (maybe a two sum or palindrome question). The next one was harder which was a spiral 2D matrix problem. I ended up finishing early so I had to open the door and call for one of the engineers that I was done. Soon after, two engineers come in to look at my code and to talk about the solution. One engineer asks me about the big O of my solutions and asks me if I could solve it any faster. I say that I believe this is the fastest possible solution and he spews back at me telling me that it can't be done any faster as if I had said something else. The engineers seems fairly impressed and tells me that I was the only one who was able to solve both problems, even noting that an interviewee who was in a Master's program couldn't get it.
I leave confidently and they tell me the HR person will contact me. I get an email from the HR person asking how it went and etc. They say that I'll be hearing back by the end of the week.
Two and a half weeks later I get no response so I reach out to the HR person and they say that they can't hire me for the role with no further explanation. I'm shocked that I had to reach out to them to get a response. Very unprofessional. I was going to decline the offer anyways since $60k income as an entry level software engineer is pretty wild if you ask me.