Interviewer called a few minutes late. Talked about my resume, why Bloomberg. He was trying to figure out hackerrank, while he was doing that we just talked about my favorite classes. It took him a bit.

After he got the hackerrank to work, he copy and pasted the question and immediately asked "What's the run time of this problem?". It caught me offguard because I usually get that question at the end after writing my solution. I said the wrong answer twice (lol), but I corrected myself while writing my solution

We talked about approaches for the problem and he was explaining how he would solve it with binary search. I had another idea in mind. So instead of writing my approach, i went with his and we found that binary search wasn't really the best idea because we found something could've went wrong. Then that problem was fixed.

I wasn't expecting to compile since a few sources on LC and their website said "don't worry about syntax". So I had to go back and fix my syntax. That took up sometime. It was able to compile and pass test cases that we discussed. Follow up questions were asked that I was able to solve immediately. What was weird, he wanted me to "system.out " the problems nicely, instead of just printing "42" he wanted "the answer is 42". I just didn't see the point because the hackerrank ide too up so much time to compile.

I was able to solve the follow ups quickly.

I felt like there could've been a lot of time saved if we got hackerrank to work quickly , if he didn't mention his thoughts, and if he didn't ask me to make the system.out a bit more friendly.

I was expecting to talk about the problem (without his thoughts). Writing the constraints of the problem and what to consider. Writing the actual problem, then discussing the runtime. After that, some followups.

Instead, the order was discussing runtime, talk about the problem, solve the problem, write out some constraints, write test cases, and follow ups.

Overall, I didnt get to approach the second problem due to time (even though I believe we had enough time to approach the 2nd problem). Which is upsetting and bad. The guy was very nice and it was very conversational. We laughed a few times and I learned a lot. I don't expect to get to the next round. I accept that I wasn't able to do well on this interview.

I want to hear your thoughts. Let me know.

Edit: problem was : Find the absolute minimum distance between two points. Return those two points and the minimum distance. Follow ups : minimize the space complexity and really simple ones, such as update the the previous points.