Please treat this as a interview at a top tech firm, and share your thoughts on how you think I did. Be honest, and leave no stone unturned.

Problem: Given two words (start and end), and a dictionary, find the length of shortest transformation sequence from start to end, such that:

Only one letter can be changed at a time Each intermediate word must exist in the dictionary For example,

Given: start = "hit" end = "cog" dict = ["hot","dot","dog","lot","log"] As one shortest transformation is "hit" -> "hot" -> "dot" -> "dog" -> "cog", return its length 5.

Note: Return 0 if there is no such transformation sequence. All words have the same length. All words contain only lowercase alphabetic characters.

Time Complexity : O(n^2) //PLEASE CONFIRM

Space complexity : O(n) My code:

   private static int ladderLength(String start, String end, HashSet<String> dict) {
        Deque<String> wordSearch = new ArrayDeque<>();
        Deque<Integer> lengthCount = new ArrayDeque<>();
        wordSearch.add(start);
        lengthCount.add(1);
        while(!wordSearch.isEmpty()){
            String analyzing  = wordSearch.poll();
            int curCount = lengthCount.poll();
            if(analyzing.equals(end)){
                return curCount;
            }
            for(int j = 0; j < analyzing.length(); j++){
                for(char i = 'a'; i <= 'z'; i++){
                    char[] possibleMatch = analyzing.toCharArray();
                    possibleMatch[j] = i;
                    String checkMatch = new String(possibleMatch);
                    if(dict.contains(checkMatch)){
                        dict.remove(checkMatch);
                        lengthCount.add(curCount + 1);
                        wordSearch.add(checkMatch);
                    }
                }
            }
        }
        return 0;
   }