TikTok Software Engineer interview experience

The interviewer gave me a LeetCode-style medium problem with specific constraints, and I worked through the coding with a decent pace. I thought the core logic was in good shape, but the feedback at the end was that I’d missed validation for the given constraints—something they seemed to care about even though I’d previously associated constraint handling as less of a focus.

In the process, I also got hit with two coding challenges that were both around medium to medium-hard difficulty. I managed only partially on the earlier one, and I didn’t solve the second fully. What stuck with me was