Awful experience. The interviewer clearly didn't want to be there and just wanted to be done as soon as possible. They set me up for failure to make their job easier.

1. I was told the tech interview wasn't a LeetCode-style problem because they don't do that; they conduct "real-life experience interviews." I very much got a LeetCode-style interview with the expectation to come up with the most optimal algorithm possible.

2. The interviewer showed up about 10 minutes late. They didn't apologize or offer to extend the coding exercise time.

3. The interviewer verbally provided the brief for the exercise. It took them about 1 minute to read it, and they expected me to retain all the information without asking questions. They were not happy when I asked for a text version of the brief so I could review it myself.

4. The text version they provided was difficult to read—a wall of text without sections, appearing all on a single line in the editor. On top of that, the interviewer wasn't answering my clarifying questions. It was like talking to a wall.

5. Once I was ready to start, the interviewer changed their mind and instructed me to implement part 2 while also doing part 1. The issue was that the brief didn't mention "part 1" or "part 2"; it was just a wall of text on one single line, over 1000 characters long.

6. The interviewer seemed bothered that I didn't understand what part 2 was, simply stating, "It's the frequency part." I had to try to find where in that inline wall of text they mentioned "frequency" and how it fit within "part 1," forcing me to do and understand two exercises at once. I have no idea how anyone could be expected to complete this exercise without a proper text brief, especially when the interviewer wouldn't answer questions.

7. Since the exercise wasn't clear and the interviewer wasn't answering my questions, I chose to focus on getting something working first and optimizing later. Unfortunately, because the interviewer arrived 10 minutes late, I ran out of time before I could optimize it.

At the end of the day, I was refused because my code wasn't optimized enough. Had they provided a proper brief with the actual requirements and not just a single-line wall of text, and had they been on time, I would have passed this interview fairly easily. The algorithm itself was basic, and I've passed much harder exercises from other companies.

Basic LeetCode problems involve handling a large amount of data in an ugly format. You have to clean it up, sort it, and perform some operations on it. The only complex part of the algorithm is to do it as optimally as possible.