First Round (Zoom):

The interviewer asked two questions.

1. The first was a basic question: to sort a given array in zigzag order. As soon as I started giving an approach, which was to sort and take items from left and right, the interviewer interrupted within 2-3 minutes, saying, "It's such an easy question. Have you ever solved data structure problems? Why do you need to sort?" I tried to explain that this was not optimal and that we could solve it in O(n) by partitioning or by finding the median.

The interviewer lost patience within 6-7 minutes and said, "You did not understand the question. Let's move on to another question." The same thing happened with the second question, although I felt that it was not easy.

At the end, there were a lot of moral lectures. I felt like leaving the interview after just 5 minutes, but I continued. That was a mistake, and I regretted it a lot later.

1. Sort a given array in zigzag order. Example: [1, 6, 7, 3, 2, 5] becomes [1, 6, 3, 7, 2, 5]. Note that there can be multiple valid solutions.

Given two strings, str1 and str2, containing characters, the task is to calculate the common subsequences in both strings.