Did failing to get optimal solution cause me to fail Meta?

• The candidate felt confident in the system design as it was similar to a question encountered in another interview.
• All coding questions were solved in under 7 minutes, including 5 minutes for clarification and approach discussion, and 2 minutes for coding.
• The candidate successfully addressed all follow-up questions from the interviewer.
• For the optimization problem, the candidate provided an O(n log n) solution using sorting but struggled to find an O(n) solution. Instead of exploring further, the candidate explained why they believed an O(n) solution was not feasible. They later realized that the O(n) solution could be achieved using bucket sort, which is similar to their approach.

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