It was annoying. First, I had trouble scheduling the interview call. Then, when the interview was finally scheduled, no one showed up. I emailed the recruiter/coordinator and received no reply. It seems there was some communication issue. Eventually, we rescheduled. I was a bit disappointed, but Snapchat was a product on which I really wanted to work. Finally, I had my interview call. The quality was terrible, but I decided to deal with it. At the other end was a Chinese man who had an accent. I have an accent too, but his was hard to understand.

He gave me a technical question: "Maximum points on a line in a 2D graph." I thought about it for a few seconds and started giving out my thought process, as I am typically trained to do in these interviews. I gave him an exponential solution, computing all the possibilities and checking which is the one we want. He seemed to have a bit of trouble following me. I tried explaining it to him, but in vain. My intention was first to convince him that this would work and then work out a better solution. I decided to write down quickly what I meant with my solution. Then he asked me to compile it. What? Okay.

We were sharing screens, and it was a bit annoying because I wasn't told beforehand that I'd be using an IDE of choice. I was using a different computer. By now, I was fiddling around with some online compiler to compile my Java code. Early in this process, I asked him if I should explain my solution. He said he'd much rather see the code working first. I had no choice. Eventually, I made it compile. I felt the interviewer was barely listening. I ran a few test cases, and everything seemed fine. He asked me the complexity, and I said it's O(2^n). He said, "So, it's slow." I wanted to scream and say, "YES, that's what I've been trying to tell you," but I resisted.

Later that night, I received a rejection. Ridiculous!

My advice to anyone who has an interview coming up: Blurt out a fast solution right away. Don't think about optimizing it later on.

As an input, you have points on a 2D graph. Your aim is to find a straight line that can fit as many points as possible. Return the maximum number of points you can fit.