Three years ago I interviewed in house (after several hours of phone screens) at an SF tech company that has since gone public. The position was for a senior so

Three years ago I interviewed in house (after several hours of phone screens) at an SF tech company that has since gone public. The position was for a senior software engineer doing mostly backend Rails stuff. The biggest portion of the in-house interview was some fairly simple algorithm puzzle involving solving some word game given some rules and a list of valid English words. That section of the interview ended with me explaining how hash table lookups are constant time and the interviewer insisting that they are linear time. To be clear, there was no “gotcha” about collision resolution or anything subtle like that. My claim just came up as an obvious step in my explanation of the running time of my proposed solution and the interviewer jumped on it. I thought I was quite cordial, but I didn’t back down, and the interviewer seemed quite aggressive. The other interviewer in the room at the time seemed very uncomfortable with the fact that I would question something so basic, but didn’t intervene or express any “opinion” on the “debate.” I was rejected due to insufficient experience. :)