Clever Software Engineer interview experience

I ran into a strict time limit for each prompt—timeouts that were too short for what the questions demanded. It wasn’t like I could think through the problem slowly; I had to read, type every character manually with no copy/paste, and still debug under pressure.

The problems themselves weren’t described as impossibly hard, but the expectations felt unrealistic: I was expected to come up with solutions cold, then rapidly handle debugging against hidden tests, all without relying on external resources like Google. The whole experience felt less like evaluating how I’d work as an engineer and