I had an initial HR screen for 30 minutes, followed by an invitation to a 60-minute technical phone screening interview. No one showed up for the technical interview. Due to poor HR management, no HR representative was available to assist when I reached out. I received a response a day later stating that the meeting was rescheduled to a week later due to miscommunication between their EU & US offices.

A week later, the technical interviewer focused more on topics unrelated to my previous work rather than discussing the projects I had been involved in.

Typical ML questions were asked, such as:

• What is L1/L2 regularization (ensure you know the math behind why L1 leads to feature sparsity versus L2, including derivations).
• The vanishing gradient problem (discuss activation functions that can mitigate this).

Finally, a LeetCode medium question concluded the session. I was able to finish the solution but did not have enough time to debug edge cases. I received an automatic rejection two days later.

Write a function to rearrange a list of article types so that no two consecutive articles are of the same type. If such an arrangement is not possible, return False.

Input:

• articles (List[str]): A list of strings where each string represents an article type. Strings are case-sensitive.

Output:

• List[str]: A valid arrangement of articles where no two consecutive elements are the same.
• bool: Return False if no valid arrangement exists.

Examples:

• Input: ["sports", "media", "sports"] Output: ["sports", "media", "sports"]

• Input: ["sports", "sports", "sports"] Output: False

• Input: ["sports", "media", "news", "media", "sports"] Output: ["sports", "media", "sports", "news", "media"]