The recruiter was nice and cooperative. However, the programmer I interviewed was literally reading the question and its accompanying story aloud, without pasting it into the code editor.

After asking him to repeat parts of the story, I realized it was a Dijkstra algorithm. We lost half the interview just to clarify what needed to be done, as the story was excessively long to read out loud. Consequently, there was not enough time for a clear implementation.

Find a path in a matrix, starting in the top-left corner and ending in the bottom-right corner, that has the lowest maximal value on the way.