Moengage SSE | DSA Interview Experience | Rejected

This was round 1 for Senior Software Engineer role. Got the interview call by having applied on LinkedIn Jobs and filling the google form they had put out.

Got asked two medium questions:

1. https://leetcode.com/problems/container-with-most-water/description/
2. https://leetcode.com/problems/magnetic-force-between-two-balls/description/

Had to solve them on IDE, pasting the questions there and was expected to run the code.

I was initially confused by problem 1 description, wasted too much time clarifying the question with examples. Once clarified, I could only come up with the brute force O(n^2) time solution and not the two pointers O(n) time solution but we moved on to the other question.

Second question went fine, I solved it optimally with a binary search on solution space with a greedy check and interviewer seemed happy with this.

Honestly I expected to pass the interview round with 1.5/2 solved thinking it should be fine to pass, but I was wrong and got my hopes up for nothing.

In the feedback, the HR mentioned I didn't solve problem 1 with the right approach. So the bar has really risen, they wanted both problems solved optimally with no room for error. She also said they thought my profile didn't match with the job role, which I found odd because if that was the case then why did they tell me hiring manager had shortlisted my profile from the applications?

Anyway, feeling bummed out a bit, the grind must continue.