The standard online assessment (OA) was followed by an online interview involving a LeetCode easy problem.

Both the OA and the interview problem were fairly easy. The biggest red flag was my interviewer.

Right off the bat, he said to not solely focus on the most optimal solution but on a practical approach. I didn't make much of it, assuming he wouldn't be too picky. The problem was essentially to determine if two strings were identical regardless of order, or if one was a substring of the other, also regardless of order.

Since he didn't care much about the optimal solution, I hacked it a bit by creating two strings with ''.join(sorted()) and then just checking if one was in the other. He seemed surprised it worked, and I walked him through why this has terrible time complexity in Python.

I suggested a more optimal solution using a dictionary and keeping track of a counter for each character. He told me to proceed with the implementation. About halfway through, he said he was looking for something more practical and that I did not have to do the most optimal solution. At this point, I knew I didn't want to work here and just said "okay."

I asked if he could walk me through his approach since I was "stuck," just to waste the last bit of the interview time. He clearly had a very specific way he wanted me to solve it that was not the most optimal approach. To me, this seems pointless, considering there are many ways to solve a problem if you want to ignore the most optimal one.

For me, this manager is someone I would not want to work with, and it left a bad taste regarding the company for me. From other posts, it seems this company is okay if you are just looking for your first internship or are looking for a company with good work-life balance and don't care much about being challenged.

Analog between 2 strings question