For the live-coding exercise, I was given a lot of materials and even an example video for how to prepare for the interview beforehand. That was nice. Upon joining the coderpad, I was given a straightforward problem and I worked through it. Nothing fancy. Then the interviewer upped the complexity of the problem. Okay, I got nervous but felt confident. However, this is where things got fishy. I talked through a couple solutions, including using reduce and recursion. I decided to go with the reduce approach, but the interviewer stopped me with a question ("reduce??"). I explained my thought process and was met with silence, so I asked what they thought. Their answer was "you mentioned recursion..." and so I sort of decided to go with the recursive approach, hoping the solution would reveal itself. I honestly didn't understand how I might do it with recursion, but tried it anyway. And this cost me the interview. I didn't complete it. After the interview I tried doing the reduce approach and completed it in under 10 minutes. I was kicking myself afterwards for letting the interviewer nudge me in the wrong direction. It was ultimately my fault. However, I felt like the interviewer did not set me up for success. At no point did they suggest 'maybe recursion isn't the way to go.' Having interviewed engineers over 100s of times at previous startups, this is absolutely something I've done in the past to help keep the momentum of the interview. Again, I take blame for perhaps not 'managing up' in this scenario, but did not appreciate the interviewers and felt that it would be appropriate to share with others.