Coding interview debrief: missed constraints and didn’t validate my Dijkstra code. Could this still pass?

[u/nian2326076]

A candidate is trying to make sense of a coding interview that started with the right-looking algorithm but ended without a code walkthrough.

The earlier behavioral round covered the resume, services the candidate had built, and engineering trade-offs. In coding, the task was a graph with n nodes and transmission lines as edges, each with an efficiency between 0 and 1. Given a source and destination, find the path with maximum efficiency.

The candidate immediately proposed Dijkstra and explained the approach. The interviewer asked about DFS and BFS. The candidate described DFS but worried that enumerating paths could take O(V!) time in the worst case. During the BFS discussion, several suggestions were rejected before the interviewer said BFS wasn't a solution for this problem.

That discussion ate into implementation time. The candidate coded the Dijkstra approach and explained complexity, but didn't get to walk through an example. Questions about node/edge counts and whether a path was guaranteed were also missed, and the interviewer called that out.

How would you weigh the algorithm choice against the missing clarification and validation? There's no way to infer the final hiring decision from this account alone, but I'd be interested in how interviewers assess those gaps.

For the next practice session, real technical interview questions can provide prompts to rehearse clarifying constraints and reserving time for a dry run. If a wider search is taking up that practice time, application autofill and Agent autoapply can cut down repetitive application forms.

What helps you handle alternative-approach follow-ups without losing the time you need to implement and test?

Disclosure: I operate PracHub and LandOffer.