I had prepped for a resume deep dive or BQ, but the moment it started, without a word, we went straight into the problem. It's been a long time since I had such a pure interview.
It was a variant of LC 3535 (unit conversion), which I'd also seen in an earlier interview report. The difference is that there's more than one family of unit conversions, e.g. temperature is one series and length is another. The approach is about the same as the original problem. But the original problem is a single tree, so you can designate a root, and that doesn't work here. A bidirectional graph does the job.
I'm feeling more and more that writing in Java puts you at a real disadvantage. I was writing furiously, got it finished, and checked the corner cases too. In the end there were several syntax errors, and while I was debugging, the interviewer said we were out of time, so I never got it running. I ran it through ChatGPT afterward and the approach was all correct, just a few syntax mistakes.
The interviewer seemed pretty rigorous. I think there's an 80% chance I'm done for. Wish me luck...
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