I skipped the phone interview due to an employee referral and proceeded directly to the technical onsite interviews. There were five one-hour, back-to-back technical rounds.

The first round was a general design round with the hiring manager. He asked some high-level architecture questions and about implementing a REST API, which were quite basic.

Following that, there were three coding interviews, each with a panel of two engineers.

My challenge was that after receiving the initial question, the interviewers gave me no time to think. Whenever I paused to consider a general solution or explore a better approach, they would immediately ask more questions. Two of those interviews seemed to be with engineers interviewing for the first time, and they appeared to have an agenda to belittle me so they could look good to others. The questions themselves weren't difficult; I ended up providing optimized O(n) solutions instead of the standard brute-force O(n^2) solutions.

I felt that two of the six engineers didn't fully grasp why my solutions were better. Ultimately, despite acing two out of the three coding interviews, I did not receive an offer. I feel let down by the interview process because, although I took a little more time, I arrived at optimal solutions for two of the three coding challenges. I could have settled for the simple, uninspired brute-force solution, but instead, I aimed for better, and they did not seem to care or notice.

The final round was a design and architecture interview with a senior engineer. I genuinely enjoyed this interview. It was open-ended and sufficiently challenging, and the interviewer seemed knowledgeable as we delved deeper into the details.

Implement a hash table