Awful experience, the interviewer clearly didn't want to be here and just wanted to be done asap. They set me up for failure to make their job easier.
1. I've been told the tech interview wasn't a leetcode or some sort because they don't do that, they do "real life experience interviews". I very much got a leetcode interview with the expectation to come up with the most optimal algorithm possible
2. The interviewer showed up about 10 min late to the interview. They didn't apologize or anything, nor they give me an extra 10 min on my coding exercise.
3. The interviewer gave me the brief of the leetcode exercise verbally, and... that's it. It took them about 1 min to read it, and they expected me to retain all the information they provided, without asking questions. They weren't very happy when I asked for a text version of the brief so I could read it by myself.
4. The text version of the brief they gave me was in a format that was hard to read, a wall of text without sections that appeared all on one single line in the editor. On top of that, the interviewer wasn't really answering any clarifying questions I had. It was like I was talking to a wall.
5. Once I was ready to start the exercise, the interviewer changed their mind and told me to actually not do part 1 as asked in the brief but to instead implement part 2 while I'm doing part 1. The issue was that the brief had no mention of "part 1" or "part 2". It was just a wall of text without sections, everything on one single line of 1000+ chars.
6. The interviewer seemed bothered by me not understanding what part 2 was, and just told me "it's the frequency part". I had to try to figure out where in that inline wall of text they talk about "frequency", and how it fits inside "part 1", forcing me to do and understand 2 exercises at once. I have absolutely no idea how they can expect anyone to do that exercise without a text version of a brief. Especially when the interviewer can't be bothered to answer questions.
7. Since the exercise wasn't clear and the interviewer wasn't answering any of my questions, I chose to focus on having something that works first and optimize later. Sadly since the interviewer arrived 10min late I ran out of time before I could optimize it.
At the end of the day, I got refused because my code wasn't optimized enough. Had they given me a proper brief with what I actually needed to do and something not all on 1 single line, and had they been on time, I would have passed this interview fairly easily. The algorithm itself was fairly basic and I passed much harder exercises from other companies.