A rather disappointing interview. They care more about LeetCode problems than they do about actual experience.

I have 5 years of embedded C experience, 3 years working on personal and open-source programming, plus a Master's degree on top, but that seemed to hold no value for them. They first put me through a simple LeetCode problem where I had to format a string, and then they asked for a second whiteboard interview. The first thing I was told is that we are not here to talk about my past experience, and that there will probably be a third and even a fourth round.

Regarding the task, I was given a rather simple problem of finding a missing number in an array of consecutive numbers. I wanted to use an efficient binary search algorithm rather than the simple linear search. However, it took more time than I expected, since I had not used these algorithms in over 12 years and was very rusty. I was already 45 minutes into a 1:30 hour interview, and as I was just debugging the final step, the host intervened and said, "Nope, this is taking too long, there is no point to continue." He stopped the interview there.

Honestly, I have no idea and am curious if I could have gotten away with using the simple method, which I could have finished in maybe 3 minutes tops. But given that he didn't stop me when I tried to do the complex one, I believe the simple one was insufficient.

Conclusion: Unless you do LeetCode and are good at it, don't bother with them. You are wasting your time, and from the looks of it, the whole interview can last several weeks.

P.S. After the interview, I went ahead and redid the problem. I was able to make it work in about the same time I spent solving it during the interview.

Format a string (round 1)

Find the missing number in a list of consecutive numbers (round 2)