I met the recruiters at my school's virtual career fair, then was invited to a "coffee chat" with an engineering team lead. It was a casual chat mostly meant for asking questions, but I had a feeling that I got along well with the team lead, and he suggested moving me forward.

Afterwards, I was contacted by a recruiter and asked to schedule a technical phone interview within a few days.

The interview was very straightforward. I was asked questions about a project I worked on for about 10 minutes, then we jumped straight into the technical interview, which I completely bombed.

It was an unorthodox question about processes crashing. It's not difficult now that I understand it, but it was unlike anything I had seen before, so I couldn't come up with a solid answer.

The interviewers were very nice and held my hand pretty significantly as they saw I was struggling to answer the question. I received a rejection email from the recruiter 2-3 days later.

There was a crash in a system of processes. Each process has children that also crash when the parent crashes.

Find the highest-level crash given an input of processes and children.