The interviewers are very poor communicators, prejudiced, and biased. They are extremely binary, possessing one "optimal" solution in front of them while you're coding and aggressively pushing for you to code exactly that. Anything you code differently "is wrong" in their eyes, regardless of whether it compiles or if the runtime is optimal.

I was given an easy LeetCode problem, "Merge Two Sorted Arrays In Place," with one array having empty spaces. I coded a working solution that compiled just fine.

Then, I was given a question to create a class with a "steps_from" method that takes an integer. If the integer is even, divide it by two (n/2). If it's odd, calculate (3*n) - 1, repeating this process until n equals 1, and return the number of steps required to reach one.

Merge Two Sorted Arrays In Place, with one array having empty spaces.

Create a class with a steps_from method that takes an integer n. If n is even, divide it by 2 (n / 2). If n is odd, calculate (3 * n) - 1. Repeat this process until n equals 1, and return the number of steps required to reach 1.