A recruiter pursued me for over a year. When I was finally ready to interview, I went through two phone screens. The first phone screen was smooth. The second phone screen went well for about half of the time. I later needed a hint to push through, but I finally came up with what I believe was an optimal solution. Unfortunately, the next day I was told that I did not clear because there are "other stronger candidates in the pipeline".

I am not sure what went wrong:

• The fact that I needed a hint.
• Or I was stuck for 5 minutes without the hint. The hint was not a solution – it was just to indicate that a solution can be done in linear time.

I was bummed to be rejected, as I thought I did well and put in a lot of effort to prepare.

Good: The recruiter personally contacted me immediately to inform me that they would not pursue the interview.

Bad: I disagree with how they evaluate candidates. If a person has an optimal solution and a good approach to solving the problem, I think they should be given an opportunity to proceed. An on-site would give a complete picture of the candidate, and the company can then truly compare with other candidates.

Unfortunately, I have come to the conclusion that this is an issue with all such companies like Airbnb, Facebook, etc., when it comes to interviewing senior engineers. If you are a new grad, you stand a better chance because you can spend the whole day solving LeetCode problems and cracking their interviews. With a full-time job, it's practically impossible to match the amount of effort a new grad can put in.

I have decided to now apply to companies that are better suited to my profile and skills. I think I am a great software engineer; I just think the skills that such companies need may just not be the ones that I have, and that is okay.

How many items of different prices can you buy within a given budget? This is sort of like the knapsack problem.

Since prices are in decimal, identify the appropriate data type to handle the mathematical operations.

Given a list of words, find all pairs of words that form a palindrome.