Find shortest subarray meeting target sum
Company: Oracle
Role: Software Engineer
Category: Coding & Algorithms
Difficulty: Medium
Interview Round: Onsite
Given an integer array nums (values may be negative) and an integer T, return the length of the shortest non-empty contiguous subarray whose sum is at least T; return -1 if no such subarray exists. Optimize for n up to 200,000. Explain your approach, prove its correctness, analyze time and space complexity, and implement an O(n) solution.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates a candidate's competence in array-based algorithm design, handling of negative values and contiguous subarray sums, and rigorous time and space complexity analysis.