The interview process was multi-step and technically challenging. It began with a phone screening focused on basic programming concepts and continued with a technical coding assessment on data structures.

The interviewers were professional and pushed for clean, optimized solutions under time pressure.

Find the second smallest element in an array

Given an array of integers nums, return the second smallest unique element in the array.

If there is no such element (e.g., all elements are equal or there is only one unique value), return -1