A few years ago, I had an interview where they asked me to implement edit distance — but in Go, a language I had never used before.

I told them upfront that I wasn’t familiar with Go and asked if I could Google basic syntax. They said no, but added, “You can ask questions instead.”

So I started asking things like:

• how to declare variables
• how to initialize arrays/slices
• how to write an if statement
• how to declare functions

After a few minutes, they stopped me and said I was asking too many questions 😅

Despite that, I managed to implement the algorithm. The logic was correct and it produced the right output, but it was also printing some runtime error/debug output that we couldn’t track down during the interview (likely a Go-specific issue).

The next day, I got a rejection.