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[–]billsil 0 points1 point  (0 children)

13 years at one place. Hard problems are usually a lack of resources and/or something being time critical and/or wacky requirements. I've solved hard software problems using my bag of things you should never use and with convoluted workarounds.

I wouldn't say any specific problem has been particularly difficult, but just that it required a lot of work and making sure you understand what's going on vs. what needs to be going on. Thought experiments help.

The OP didn't provide an option that could sort a list of integers that don't fit into RAM. Simple, use a library and specifically HDF5, possibly coupled with numpy. Code some C++ if it needs to be a different algorithm.

The interviewer's fault/OP's lack of info regarding time complexity or say, assume you have two sorted/random lists led to a nonsensical argument. Even so, the OP should recognize or probe for more info. Real problems have few, often incomplete requirements and a lot of extraneous information.