The interview was tricky. The interviewer was engaging and helpful, but the question was hard to even understand, let alone solve.

I had been expecting something akin to a LeetCode problem, but the given problem was more of a general logic/knowledge/comprehension exercise, which threw me off.

Apparently, this is very typical with Google; the questions will be deliberately vague and open-ended so that the interviewer can focus more on your raw reasoning process than how much LeetCode you have practiced.

The question was about finding the index in a buffer of an element "after the system crashes." Not really an algorithmic question as far as I could tell, more of a "A has 2 apples, B has 3 apples, calculate the mass of the sun" type of question.