Timeline: August Second Week
Reschedule count : 1
Total Time spent: 45 minutes

Pre-Join : I was neither so motivated nor so down, after facing the second round incident. (Can check my previous posts , link below)
Join: Interviewer joined almost on time. Seriously not going to judge, He gave me so hopeless negative vibes. He seemed soo gloomy and uncomfortable. I am quite familiar with this vibes as I am also from a backend team lol. Question was provided.

Started : Question was: A list(array) of words will be provided, I need to find a pair of words where there is no common letter in between and return the maximum product of their length possible.
Examples : [”dog”, “cat”, “pull”, “space”, ”feed”] ⇒ answer is “pull” and “feed”

I came up with a brute force approach. Simple O(n^2) with double for loop and set implementation. Coded it, dry ran it. Done
(15 minutes passed)

Since the beginning, I knew this problem is not that simple, This question has a catch. After my code, Interviewer didn’t seem satisfied. He expressed I was doing repetitive task. Got the clue. That set implementation was the repetitive task. I made a dictionary to cache the set implementation.
But couldn’t optimize further. I tried a trie approach, But failed. Then for the rest of the time we discussed all the edge cases and its handling.

End Discussion: About his team, and working
Results : Never asked

Main Post : link