Is there any scenario where sorting is the best approach?
Only if you need to find many specific ranked elements (e.g., the top 100 elements out of 1000) or if the array needs to remain sorted for future operations.
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More FAQs in Why Sorting to Find the Second Largest is Suboptimal
It is not technically wrong, but it is highly inefficient (O(N log N)) and will not pass the interviewer's requirement for an optimal O(N) solution.
The most efficient general-purpose sorting algorithms (like Merge Sort, Quick Sort, TimSort) require O(N log N) comparisons mathematically to guarantee a sorted array.
Sorting places duplicates next to each other. To find the second unique largest, you still have to iterate through the sorted array to bypass the duplicates.
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