RejectedTechnical Screen

Interviewer Couldn't Follow My One-Pass DFS Trick

LinkedInSoftware Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026

Two questions. The first was to merge an n-ary tree by key -- only nodes that share the same key get merged. It's solvable with DFS. Make sure to ask about the corner cases up front, like whether the root keys are even the same. The second question was similar in spirit. The interviewer completely did not understand this problem. I wrote out the following conversion formula, which lets you solve…

Shared by a candidate · reported Sep 2026. Interview formats change; use it as a guide, not a script.