Snowflake Software Engineer interview experience

In the first coding round, I felt like I had the right direction: I was planning to use a tree-like data structure and I explained my reasoning out loud. The interviewer pushed me toward an almost brute-force approach first, and I ended up spending the remaining time implementing what I was asked rather than rewriting toward the more optimal structure I originally wanted.

After that, I got feedback that suggested I had problems with data structures, even though I believed I’d started from a reasonable place and was guided away from it. There were also general follow-up questions about search