The part that’s really depressing about this article is it’s really clear that the interviewer has one golden path that the candidate has to walk in order to be

The part that’s really depressing about this article is it’s really clear that the interviewer has one golden path that the candidate has to walk in order to be ordained as meeting the bar. Any question like that is intrinsically bad in my view. As a sidebar note, while the time complexity reasoning is important and is part of day to day life writing software this algorithm is unlike anything I have ever actually done as a software engineer. That would be a warning sign to me if I was thinking of using this question that maybe it’s not actually going to evaluate skills relevant to the role but rather test leetcode. Good questions allow multiple possible solutions[1], allowing a candidate to arrive at a successful solution via many different paths while still evaluating whether they are going to be able to perform well at the job. I don’t think this question comes close to meeting that standard. [1] By which I mean fundamentally different approaches rather than syntactic variants on the same basic thing