I had an initial interview with a PHR rep who was very polite and professional, who moved me to the next steps, which was a Coding Exercise. This exercise was a bit unorthodox, as it was a "take-home" style exercise, where I was given as much time as needed to complete the challenge, with trust that I will not utilize outside resources to do so. However, the exercise itself contained quite a few ambiguities that, due to the nature of the situation, were not able to be clarified. Because of this, I provided both a simple 6-line solution to the problem and a more elaborate solution that accounted for other potential interpretation(s), edge cases, and scalability. After completing my submission along with a full writeup of my thoughts and reasoning behind my implementation(s), I received the following feedback over two weeks later: "Your solution was one of the longest we seen, and your opted to use loops is not ideal. Complexity is at least n squared" Typos aside, this feedback was incredibly surprising to me, as my solution not only employed a single loop per condition, but also operated in O(n), not O(n^2), which should have been immediately apparent to any seasoned software engineer. Additionally, the reviewer seemed to imply that the length of my submission was a downside, while I clearly had provided a simple 6-line solution in tandem with my more elaborate one. This indicated that whoever read over my submission had either made multiple mistakes in their analysis, or had potentially confused my submission with that of another candidate. After politely inquiring if it could be verified that the feedback provided pertained to my work, the representative from HR informed me that the employee who reviewed my submission was out of office, at which point I did not hear back again. Overall, this interview experience was very negative due to the significant disparity between the effort I invested in the process and what seemed to be a lack of effort, qualification, or organization on the part of the reviewer(s).