Verily Life Sciences Technical Phone Interview - Arithmetic Expression Simplification
Interview Experience
Completed technical phone screen with Verily Life Sciences. Got asked this problem ## Question Given an arithmetic expression like a-(b+c)
return a simplified expression. Examples: * a-(b+c) gives
Full Details
Completed technical phone screen with Verily Life Sciences. Got asked this problem ## Question Given an arithmetic expression like a-(b+c)
return a simplified expression. Examples: * a-(b+c) gives a-b-c * a+(a+b) gives a+a+b Requirements: * Variables are single letter. Don't worry about subscripts. Keep it simple * Operations are only addition and subtraction. No worries about multiplication and division *
Followup: in math, you combine like terms when simplifying an expression. Modify your implementation to support that ## Reflection * Talked out my thought process and interviewer was very collaborative * I think I got a much better handle on the recursion after solving "decoding an encoding" in a different interview * Had a bit of trouble handling the open parentheses case and "combining the results" while accounting for negation. Interviewer gave me hint here and I was able to run with it * Started with simple cases and then stress tested with other edge case. Interviewer liked my progress so far
About This Question
This is a candidate experience report from a verily life sciences interview for a swe role during the phone screen round reported in 2026.
It covers the following topics: Recursion .
Difficulty rating: Easy