Initial phone interview with a recruiter to be screened for fit, behavioral, etc. Once I passed that, I had an hour-long technical coding interview. I received a rejection email after a week of waiting.

The technical interview problem was poorly worded.

Given an array of integers, we define its degree as the number of occurrences of the element that occurs most frequently in the array. You will be given a list of integers and must determine two properties:

• The degree of the array
• The length of the shortest sub-array that shares that degree

For example, consider the array [1, 2, 1, 3, 2]. It has a degree of 2, based on the elements with values 1 and 2. The sub-array of degree 2 based on the 1’s is [1,2,1] and based on the 2’s is [2,1,3,2]. Their lengths are 3 and 4, so the shortest is length 3.

Property 1 is 2 and property 2 is 3.

Write a function that returns the second property, i.e., the length of the shortest sub-array that shares the maximum degree.