I'm just imagining an engineer coming up with a novel solution to this problem in under the hour deadline and then not getting hired because it's not the "Robert W. Floyd's tortoise and hare" algorithm.

"So we specifically asked for linear time."

"Uh, yeah, I did it in log(n). That's better."

"It doesn't match what's on this paper they gave me. Thanks for your time. We'll be in touch."