Don’t Cheat on Interviews. It’s Obvious when you do.

I interviewed a remote candidate recently over Google Meet for a software engineering position.

I asked him a simple question that involved sorting an array with a fixed range of integers.

He first suggested using merge-sort, quick-sort, heap-sort, etc… Basically all the O(nlog(n))) or O(n²) algorithms. Which is normal but not exactly what I was looking for.

However, I wanted him to come up with the O(n) solution and suggested he look for a faster algorithm given the constraints.

He said he didn’t know any more algorithms. Which is ok, because I wanted him to think through the problem, even though he didn’t know the specific algorithm. I even told him the clue was in the range of the integers, which was 0–1000.

He struggled a little bit more and kept saying he couldn’t think of anything.

I told him I believe he can figure it out, he just had to think a little bit.

There was silence for a couple of minutes, then he did something you should never do in an interview.

He started to make it seem like his wifi connection went bad even though it had been perfectly fine the entire time. He turned off his video and we exchanged the words “can you hear me” back and forth for a good 5…