Embarrassing code I wrote under stress at a job interview (at Adaptly) I've done about 100 interviews at a large tech company. You did fine. Maybe not the best

Embarrassing code I wrote under stress at a job interview (at Adaptly) I've done about 100 interviews at a large tech company. You did fine. Maybe not the best but far from the worst, and definitely in the upper half. The guy who is interviewing me has mostly stopped watching, because he’s already decided there is no chance in hell that they will be hiring me. He is looking at his phone. More likely he was bored because he's done this dozens of times and always ends up twiddling his thumbs while the candidate deals with silly syntax errors. (Incidentally this is a point in favor of whiteboards, so that you both can focus on the actual logic rather than fighting the compiler). I think they want someone who can write something like this in 5 minutes If an interview session is 30 minutes, the anticipated outcome is not that you solve the problem in 5 minutes and spend 25 minutes chatting about the weather. I guarantee that many if not most candidates don't get to the point you did of having a working solution. Even if they say “Please feel free to ask questions” if you phrase the question the wrong way, or ask a question outside the bounds of what they were expecting, it becomes a mark against you. I obviously can't prove the lack of a subconscious effect, but I've never criticized a candidate for any question that they asked. Confirming something that was in the problem description is neutral, asking about something that wasn't (e.g. "is the input case-sensitive?") is a positive.