[sadamznintern]

It may not have been the intention but I'm honestly aghast at the utter elitism coming out of Google and Facebook. I get that you are "superior humans" that are plucked from top institutions making 25% more than me at Amazon, but you don't have to keep emphasizing it.

My interviewer offered suggestions. Finally I described memoizing it (can be done with 2 lines in Python with a dictionary) though he was more interested in how to do it without extra space by utilizing a BFS that uses the input list as a queue. Then he ran off for another meeting.

[jfasi]

> I'm honestly aghast at the utter elitism coming out of Google and Facebook

I presume it's Google and Facebook's extremely high hiring bar that you're attributing to elitism? Let me attempt to reframe that for you in a way that I hope will let you let go of some of the anger I'm picking up on:

There's no denying that Google and Facebook target top-tier institutions and put their candidates through hell. However, I don't attribute this to elitism. I personally got my start at a less-than-stellar CS program, and I go out of my way to recruit there as an alum. I've detected no elitism from any recruiters, interviewers, or hiring managers, and I've seen a number of people hired as interns and full time engineers as a direct result of my outreach. If Google were as elitist an organization as you seem to think, I and the people I've helped get hired would never have had a chance.

So then what explains the high bar? Simple necessity. I can't share details, but the number of applications we receive for every opening is staggering. What's more, when we approach people in industry and academia, we see a high rate of interest. The blunt truth is that we are more selective about hiring because we can be. When a hundred people (not real figures) apply for each available posting and your hiring pipeline is staffed well enough to interview all of them, you'd better believe you're going to hire the best one in that pool. This isn't a Google thing, this isn't a Facebook thing, this is a rational actor thing.

So no, I don't think you're stupid for coming up with a suboptimal solution, I have no reason to think you're a bad engineer, and I wouldn't reject you because your background. However, given a pool of candidates of whom some got as far as solution 3 and some got as far as solution 1, I'm going to more enthusiastically recommend hiring the ones who got solution 3.

[sadamznintern]

>I presume it's Google and Facebook's extremely high hiring bar that you're attributing to elitism?

Yes and no. It's that I'm inferior and stupid for being at a lower tier company than at Facebook or Google. I can see it in every condescending hiring post about how easy it is to pass interviews without seeing similar problems before, switch companies and save for retirement and how nice it is to work at a company that treats you like an ubermensch.

>I've detected no elitism from any recruiters, interviewers, or hiring managers, and I've seen a number of people hired as interns and full time engineers as a direct result of my outreach.

I have absolutely heard of individuals from top tier schools getting easy questions while I got tougher ones, cases where people from top programs and other top companies (like Facebook) getting the benefit of a doubt in borderline situations, etc.

In some ways its even worse than at Facebook, at least at Facebook there isn't a hiring committee after a team match like there is at Google now.