I met with a recruiter, and the conversation went really well. It seemed like I was a good fit for the role.

A week later, I had a coding interview. The interviewer read off a prompt about the problem and gave me a sample interface and runtime execution to work from. I had a bit of a slow start working through the problem and didn't implement the most efficient way of solving it out of the gate. However, I was able to make updates to improve efficiency and had the execution working by the time the interview ended. I also tried my best to ask clarifying questions, explain my thinking, what I was doing, and why.

Could I have done better? Sure, but coding interviews are nerve-wracking. And asking people to solve a problem in a way they wouldn't typically solve it is silly. How you solve LeetCode problems is not how you write real software.

I received an email the next day saying I was denied based on the coding interview.

Implement a service that tracks the popularity of a given set of IDs (that represent some piece of content).

Write code to increase/decrease the popularity of a piece of content and a method that tells you the most popular content at any time.