Uber Phone Screen

The interview involved a phone screen with a coding question. The prompt was to write a function breakingBad(name, symbols) that takes a name and a set of symbols (representing elements from the periodic table) as input. The function should return a phrase where each word is replaced with the longest symbol present in that word, followed by the rest of the word. For example, given symbols = [H, He, Li, Be, B, C, N, F, Ne, Na, Co, Ni, Cu, Ga, Al, Si, Fa] and breakingBad("henry alba", symbols), the output should be [He]nry [Al]ba. The candidate described their approach, which involved using a set for efficient symbol lookup, finding the maximum length of any symbol, breaking down the input string into words, and then recursively searching for the longest symbol within each word. The candidate acknowledged that this approach was brute force and expressed interest in optimizing it. They found the question challenging and were curious about alternative solutions.