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You walk into the interview feeling confident, solve the coding challenge with some clever logic, maybe even optimize it a bit. Then the interviewer hits you with "Why didn't you just use a hashmap?" and suddenly you're questioning your entire existence as a developer. The brutal reality is that interviewers have THE solution in mind, and if you don't immediately jump to their preferred data structure, you're cooked. Doesn't matter if your solution works or is even elegant—if it's not a hashmap when they wanted a hashmap, you're getting the rejection email faster than O(1) lookup time. Pro tip: When in doubt during coding interviews, just throw a hashmap at the problem. Two-sum? Hashmap. Anagrams? Hashmap. Finding duplicates? Believe it or not, also hashmap. It's basically the duct tape of data structures in technical interviews.