I failed a take home challenge from Netflix and was a sad with how it went down. I was given 24 hours to complete the assignment and told that I 1.) shouldn't try to be clever, and 2.) that it shouldn't take more me more than 2 to 3 hours to complete. Early on I realized that the only way to get optimal performance was to use an interval tree to store my data, but thought that an interval tree was being "too clever". I implemented a more naive solution and submitted it with comments indicating that I believed that an interval tree was the optimal data structure to use in this case.

The response was that an interval tree was the correct data structure to use in order to pass the performance component of the assignment and that they were not interested in continuing with me any further. In hindsight I should have reached out to validate whether an interval tree was "too clever", and I think that was a more important factor in my failure than anything.