Upstart Software Engineer Interview Experience — Three OA Questions, Stuck on a Grid-Search Timeout

There were three questions in total, and two of them hadn't shown up in any interview reports before.

1. Given a list of coordinates (x, y), find the min x, min y, max_x - min_x, and max_y - min_y.
2. The problem statement was basically: filter out (name, score) pairs where the score is above a threshold, keep everything below the threshold, then find the max score among what's left and return its name.
3. This one gave 40 minutes. I only passed two test cases and couldn't get the large test data to pass — I wasn't even sure how the grading was supposed to work.

The gist of it was: you're given a grid, and within a max-attempt limit you need to find the "compromised" server.

solve(x, y, direction, width, height) — x is the column, y is the row, and direction is a string representing one of the eight directions on the grid (down, up, left, right, up-right, down-right, up-left, down-left).

My solution was to move one step for each given direction, but that didn't pass the large test data. In the last two minutes it suddenly hit me — maybe the idea was that for a given direction, I should recursively keep moving inside the function until I couldn't move anymore, then return the final coordinates?

Either way, I failed the last four test cases and couldn't figure out what they actually wanted. I tried using a visited set to avoid re-walking cells, but the problem doesn't seem to involve revisiting cells anyway, since the large test case just kept going down-right the whole time — and it just timed out.

I'm guessing I failed this one. Sharing my report to help everyone else out.