I went through a recruiter and then did a 1-hour tech interview.

One of the recruiters arrived early just as I did, so I tried to engage in small talk. I received a one-word response, so I decided to awkwardly stare at my screen while waiting for the second reviewer. The second reviewer asked about my experience. He asked a couple of the questions twice because he thought I hadn't answered them, though I am pretty confident I did. This communication problem extended to the technical problems.

I decided to do the tech problems in a programming language I am more familiar with. I should have just chosen Java, since they were mostly LeetCode easy problems. I think not doing it in Java caused difficulties for the interviewers. All of my solutions had a time complexity of O(n).

I did expect one question to be iterated on, so I made it a bit more complicated than needed to avoid refactoring. However, he switched to a completely different LeetCode problem (my mistake for prematurely optimizing). For the last problem, I ran out of time but was slowly getting to the right solution.

My advice for the company is:

1. Only interview people you intend to hire. Even before starting on the technical problems, I felt like I wasn't going to get the job or move on. It felt like the interviewers were going through the motions from the beginning.

2. I felt like choosing a different language than Java hurt my chances, assuming I had any. This caused more problems than I expected. Maybe that is fair, considering the position was a Java position, but the interview was labeled language-agnostic.

3. I think a more generalized interview process would be a better way to attract talent. As an outsider, it is hard to determine which team to apply to. While at the end of the interview I didn't want to work with the team that interviewed me, I was completely open to checking out another team.

What is the maximum sum of a subsequence in an array?