Hi,

I had two coding rounds at Citadel.
Round 1:
I was asked one medium question:
A list of currency relationships with exchange values. (BTC - USD)
find the best exchange rate from currency1 to currency2.

I was able to solve this within time. There were few edge cases, which I missed that interviewer pointed out, like self loops.

I waited one business day for the response. I was moved to second interview.

Round 2:
I was asked one hard problem Word Ladder II with a variation. It was exactly like world ladder except interviewer did not mention shortest path between 2 words. I implemented it using dfs, which obviously did not render the shortest path. After my implementation, interviewer mentioned that it would have been better to print shortest path. I mentioned that in that case I would use BFS. There was no time left. I had a working solution with DFS. There was only one test case which was in coderpad and my solution gave right answer for it.

I waited 8 business days for the result of this interview. After 2 follow up emails, I got the response that I did not pass this interview.

Rant:
I don't know what I did wrong. I was confident that I solved a hard problem in an interview that I had never seen, but still got rejection. 8 business days for interview feedback also felt a lot.