NetApp Software Engineer interview experience

I had two coding rounds. In the first, I was asked to find local minima in an array. I started with a simple iterative approach, and the interviewer pushed me to optimize it using something like binary search. I tried to follow that direction with the example they gave, but I eventually realized the optimization didn’t hold for the way the problem is defined, and I stopped trying to force it and wrote the recursive solution they wanted.

The second coding question was about converting numbers from 1 to n into binary and counting the total number of 1s. I solved that, though I noticed