I made it to the coding screen, which consisted of two one-hour technical interviews.

The first interview featured a LeetCode Medium problem.

The second interview also presented a LeetCode Medium problem, but the interview was unstructured.

I stated I would code the brute force solution before attempting to optimize it. Debugging my solution took longer than anticipated. It was a tree problem, and I was defining all inputs, so I spent half the interview setting up test cases and debugging TreeNode console logs.

With only ten minutes remaining, the interviewer asked for the optimal solution to a follow-up question. They were combative, stating they were not convinced it was optimal and handled edge cases, despite my best response in the remaining time. The interviewer did not allocate time effectively to fit the follow-up into the forty-five-minute window.

Tree medium that deals with pruning and greedy max heap as a follow-up.