Nintendo of America Software Engineer interview experience

The task itself sounded straightforward, centered on parsing and comparing keys from text input.

What caught me off guard was the setup. They ran it in a constrained environment—basically a barebones VM—with no clear mention of what tools were already installed. I tested my solution locally on different systems and it worked for me, but when they tried to compile it, it failed on their side.

They treated it like a strict pass/fail checkpoint, and I didn’t advance because the code couldn’t compile in their environment. That made the experience feel less like evaluating my algorithm quality