Meta - Phone Screen (London) Interview E5/E6 [Passed]

1. On question one i made a huge mistake, because task was presented without any constraints. So i jumped into the coding taking care of just numbers and letters and Inteviewer quickly presented test case to show me my incompentence. Please, please. Speak with your Interviewer before coding! Verify question, verify constraints, discuss even before presenting approach.. It could cost me rejection. Luckily i responded very quickly and adapted, so in next few minutes i quickly veryfied constrainst and came with good creative test cases. I guess it saved my ass.
2. On question two after discussion i quickly came with linear approach, and i think expressed my process very clearly. What is more important i came also with binary search approach, but i didn't repeat my mistake from question one and started dicussing my quick BS implementation. Together with the Interviewer we quickly verified test cases and i realized how tricky is this variant, and probably binary search is not possible and we should fall back to linear approach.

As you see i made a mistakes, and still passed. I assume it's because i kept Interviewer engaged, i responded quickly to the feedback and also was ready to deeply discuss approach, not just a coding. That should be the lesson for us.

Interviewer was extremely professional and very metodic, so it made things much more easy to understand expectations. So i guess i was lucky meeting this Interviewer, he built very positive experience.