I had a scheduled interview for the Cloud Platforms Engineer role, which included a phone screen with the Hiring Manager (HM). He was five minutes late to the interview. During the call, he explained about the team, and I shared my work experiences.

Around 12:25, I received a coding question. I clarified the question and asked a few questions myself. Then, I explained how I would solve it, for example, by using a Set to populate values. I gave him an overview of my approach, and he asked me to code it. I showed him an O(n) solution and ran a couple of tests to validate it.

However, towards the end of the interview, he started asking for a sorting solution, which didn’t make sense since I had already provided the most efficient solution. This happened about 10 minutes before the interview was supposed to end, so I couldn't come up with a solution on the spot. I mentioned to the HM that sorting is O(N log N).

Two weeks later, I received a rejection email. It was a frustrating situation. I do not recommend wasting your time here.

LeetCode style DSA question, medium level.