[lalwanivikas]

> You should not be blamed for assuming, when talking to Google, that the O(n!) or O(n^2) solution is not even worth talking about. So I flopped around on O(n), O(nm) and O(nlogn) solutions after trying to whiteboard a recurrence relationship and giving up on O(1).

Did they say that they don't even want to listen to O(n^2) solution?

[badlucklottery]

I'd be super surprised if they did. Google interviewers usually encourage you to spit out an easily-verifiable O(n^2) (or even worse!) solution as fast as possible. That way, if you get stuck and honestly can't finesse a faster solution, you can code that up and provide a code sample. People still try to fake their way through the process so being able to code up something close to a compilable function is a useful metric.

[ASinclair]

Yep. This is how I conduct my interviews. I don't ask trick questions. Many of my candidates can quickly notice the simple solution but fail to write the solution in code.

[hinkley]

Yeah, this wasn't a coding question.