Standard OA then followed by an online interview over leetcode easy problem. The OA and the problem in interview were all fairly easy. The biggest red flag was based on my interviewer. Right off the bat he said to not solely focus on most optimal solution but practical approach. Didn't make much of it other that he wouldn't get to picky. The problem was essentially seeing if two strings were identical regardless of order or if one was a substring of the other regardless of order. Since he didn't care much about optimal solution I hacked it a bit by creating two strings with ''.join(sorted()) and then just checking if 1 was in the other. He seemed surprised it worked and I walked him through why in python this has a terrible time complexity. I suggested a more optimal solution using a dictionary and keeping track of a counter for each character and told me to proceed with the implementation. About half way in he said he was looking for something more practical and that I did not have to do the most optimal solution. At this point I knew I didn't want to work here and just said okay. I asked him if he could walk me through his approach since I was "stuck" just to waste the last bit of the interview time. He clearly had a very specific way he wanted for me to solve that was not the most optimal approach. To me this seems pointless considering there are many ways to solve a problem if you want to ignore the most optimal one. For me this manager is someone I would not want to work with and left a bad taste on the company for me. From other posts it seems this company is okay if you are just looking for your first internship or are looking for a company with a good WLB and don't care much about being challenged.