Headlands Technologies interview questions

Received a HackerRank online assessment - 2 hours, 1 question. Ridiculously hard problem, very intentionally convoluted wording that results in you spending way too much time reading and re-reading the prompt to decompose it into what's actually being asked for. Then you have to do the actual problem which is equivalent to a LeetCode hard (once you've spent a ton of time figuring out what the constraints actually are) while also sanitizing the input stream which could contain malformed lines. Didn't finish in time, and honestly feel like the test is setup so that only savants or competitive programmers can get through it in the time allotted. If that's what headlands wants, then I guess it's well optimized. I would strongly recommend Headlands swap to a different problem altogether, or a composition of problems with more direct/clear-cut problem descriptions. This OA problem would be something you'd see at an onsite where there would be back-and-forth dialogue with the interviewer so that there's a dialogue about constraints, with the model being sketched out with some starter code. Having to decompose a problem with constraints buried within paragraphs while also juggling stdin and handling malformed input is not setting the company up for success in getting well-rounded applicants.

Interviewed. very hard. It was a 2 hour hacker rank and the question was very challenging. make sure you study c++ before hand. otherwise you'll not be prepared. Overall cool company, wish I got the Job