BILL Software Engineer interview experience

During a technical interview, I was given a string manipulation challenge tied to a fintech context, and I honestly struggled to understand what was being tested beyond basic problem solving. I worked through the solution and was actively fixing an issue when a null pointer exception came up. I even identified what caused it and was working to get it to run.

But as the clock was running out, the interviewer told me time was up right when I was close to having the code execute. After the interview, I was able to run the code again and verify that it worked. The whole experience left me