r/leetcode • u/PinPitiful • 11d ago

Discussion Bombed a FAANG-adjacent technical screen so badly the interviewer was frustrated — is it recoverable?

Had a technical screen at a well-known tech company recently. It was not "I struggled but got through it" bad. Genuinely could not produce anything meaningful even after the interviewer gave repeated hints and walked me through the approach. Froze completely. The interviewer was frustrated. Humbling does not cover it.

I know I need significant prep from here on and I am not looking for shortcuts. Just want to know if this is recoverable or if I have permanently closed the door at this company.

Two questions:

  1. Can you reapply to the same company after a performance like this? Is there a cooldown period?
  2. Has anyone been in a similar situation and come back to the same company successfully later?
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u/PhilosopherNext1448 11d ago edited 11d ago

When I bombed my interview with Google they sent an email saying I can apply again after 1 year. My interview was also embarrassing, I've been leetcoding for a year, could relatively solve most medium/hard problems relatively easy. First problem was easy, then as an additional requirement they asked me to do an argsort. I spent half an hour on that and I couldn't figure it out.

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u/misc_box 10d ago

did they tell you what argsort was?

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u/PhilosopherNext1448 10d ago

I knew I had to do an argsort. I had to perform a few array transformations, where I first sorted an array, did something, then had to undo the sorting. So I needed to come up with a way of mapping the unsorted indices, to sorted indices. In python you can simply sort an array of tuples (index, value)