You may be entirely correct in your analysis. There are definitely a fair share of toxic interview setups and interviewers out there. What I found off putting a

You may be entirely correct in your analysis. There are definitely a fair share of toxic interview setups and interviewers out there. What I found off putting about the way you presented the story was the bit at the end where you gloated about your current employment status and achievements as if they missed out on some great mind. It gives the impression that in your view, your intellectual prowess was more important than being a good candidate and potential teammate. While that of course may just be the way it came off, that was my perception. So it drove me to present the alternate, less charitable, interpretation where the interviewers did in fact understand amortized complexity and simply didn't find it suitable. > I would have been happy to have a more productive discussion about which problems amortized analysis was the right fit for. This is the type of conversation I tend to enjoy during interview problem solving because IMO it most accurately reflects the type of conversation you'd actually have with teammates when building a system. I also might try to bait this topic by specifying O(1) worst case insertion up front and watch for how the candidate interprets the requirement, what type of questions are asked, etc. If you started implementing an array backed thing I might stop you early and prompt the insertion analysis specifically. However, in my experience people tend to discuss an overview of the solution before writing any code which is a great point to iron out any clear non-starters or missing requirements. > Overall, they had a superior tone that I found off-putting. Fair. It's a two way street after all. Even if they were entirely fine and it was all a comms misunderstanding, sometimes personalities just don't gel. Glad you found success the next day!