Citadel Software Engineer interview experience

I went in completely blind—I'd never done a LeetCode-style problem—and I was expecting something medium or hard. Instead, the first 45-minute round turned into a custom, stateful data-structure / object-oriented design problem with optimization constraints.

The interviewer didn’t give full context. I tried proposing one approach, and after I committed, more information came out and I had to pivot to a different direction. The task involved around 90 lines of code, and I couldn’t get traction the way I expected—I got only about halfway and felt like I was constantly behind. On top of the