Coding Interview Questions

Karan K. - "2 Approaches: 1) The more intuitive approach is doing a multi-source BFS from all cats and storing the distance of closest cats. Then do a dfs/bfs from rat to bread. Time Complexity: O(mn + 4^L) where L is path length, worst case L could be mn Space Complexity: O(m*n) 2) The first approach should be fine for interviews. But if they ask to optimize it further, you can use Binary Search. Problems like "Finding max of min distance" or "Finding min of max" could be usually solved by BS. "See full answer

Gaston B. - "Use a representative of each, e.g. sort the string and add it to the value of a hashmap> where we put all the words that belong to the same anagram together."See full answer

Anonymous Possum - "#inplace reversal without inbuilt functions def reverseString(s): chars = list(s) l, r = 0, len(s)-1 while l < r: chars[l],chars[r] = chars[r],chars[l] l += 1 r -= 1 reversed = "".join(chars) return reversed "See full answer

Bala G. - "WITH ActiveUsersYesterday AS ( SELECT DISTINCT user_id FROM user_activity WHERE activity_date = CAST(GETDATE() - 1 AS DATE) ), VideoCallUsersYesterday AS ( SELECT DISTINCT user_id FROM video_calls WHERE call_date = CAST(GETDATE() - 1 AS DATE) ) SELECT (CAST(COUNT(DISTINCT v.userid) AS FLOAT) / NULLIF(COUNT(DISTINCT a.userid), 0)) * 100 AS percentagevideocall_users FROM ActiveUsersYesterday a LEFT JOIN VideoCallUsersYesterday v ON a.userid = v.userid;"See full answer

Anonymous Anteater - "select employeename, employeeid, salary, department, DR from ( select employeename, employeeid, salary, dense_rank() over (partition by department order by salary desc) DR, department from employee ) where DR <=3 order by department, DR"See full answer

Kofi N. - "const mergeIntervals = (intervals) => { const compare = (a, b) => { if(a[0] b[0]) return 1 else if(a[0] === b[0]) { return a[1] - b[1] } } let current = [] const result = [] const sorted = intervals.sort(compare) for(let i = 0; i = b[0]) current[1] = b[1] els"See full answer

Bala G. - "SELECT s.Sale_Date, SUM(si.Quantity * si.SalePrice) AS TotalRevenue FROM Sales s JOIN SaleItems si ON s.SaleID = si.Sale_ID GROUP BY s.Sale_Date ORDER BY s.Sale_Date; "See full answer

Ramachandra N. - "from collections import deque from typing import List def longestsubarraydifflessthan_n(nums: List[int], N: int) -> int: """ Find the length of the longest contiguous subarray such that the difference between any two elements in the subarray is less than N. Equivalent condition: max(subarray) - min(subarray) < N Approach (Optimal): Sliding window with two monotonic deques: max_d: decreasing deque of indices (front is index of current max"See full answer

Frederick K. - "\# An program that prints out the peak elements in a list of integers. Pseudocode: 1. Define a function that takes a list of integers as input. 2. Initialize an empty list to store the peak elements. 3. Loop through the list of integers. 4. For each element, check if it is greater than its neighbors. 5. If it is, add it to the list of peak elements. 6. Return the list of peak elements. def findpeakelements(nums): if not nums: return [] peaks = [] n = len(nums"See full answer

Rishabh L. - "with empbysalary as ( select id, firstname, lastname, salary, department_id, rank() over (partition by department_id order by salary desc) as rnk from employees ) select d.name as department_name, e.id as employee_id, e.firstname, e.lastname, e.salary from empbysalary e join departments d on e.department_id=d.id where e.rnk=1 order by 1; `"See full answer

Venkata rakesh M. - "Here if we breakdown each dependency [A,B] , We need to check if there a cycle in Dependency Graph. If there is cycle installation is not possible, If there is no cycle installation is possible. Steps : 1: Build the graph 2: Perform DFS based Cycle Detection 3: Check each package if those packages have cycle or not."See full answer

Nicholas S. - "First thing the interviewee did wrong is not asking clarifying questions. This is the most vague problem I have every heard, and the interviewee just made assumptions and started programming."See full answer

Ajay U. - "// C++ program to print the count of // subsets with sum equal to the given value X #include using namespace std; // Recursive function to return the count // of subsets with sum equal to the given value int subsetSum(int arr[], int n, int i, int sum, int count) { // The recursion is stopped at N-th level // where all the subsets of the given array // have been checked if (i == n) { // Incrementing the count if sum is // equal to 0 and returning the count if (sum == 0)"See full answer

Aashka C. - "Sorted the array and stored the minimum difference in a variable and then traversed the array for the pairs having minimum difference"See full answer

Gaurav B. - "class TreeNode(var val: Int, var left: TreeNode? = null, var right: TreeNode? = null) fun isAverageOfDescendants(root: TreeNode?): Boolean { fun helper(node: TreeNode?): Triple { if (node == null) return Triple(0, 0, true) val (leftSum, leftCount, leftValid) = helper(node.left) val (rightSum, rightCount, rightValid) = helper(node.right) val totalSum = leftSum + rightSum val totalCount = leftCount + rightCount // If leaf n"See full answer

J R. - "These are a set of utilities used to manage the heap memory as part of an application. The C standard library implements these functions. malloc(bytes) takes a number of bytes and returns a pointer to the start of the allocated buffer. If the allocation failed, a null pointer is returned instead. calloc(count, size) behaves like malloc(count * size), but also zero-initializes the allocated buffer, assuming the allocation succeeded. realloc(ptr, size) takes a pointer to a previously al"See full answer

Firdous A. - "Approach (BFS + Horizontal Distance) Assign a horizontal distance (HD) to each node. Root → HD = 0 Left child → HD = parent HD - 1 Right child → HD = parent HD + 1 Do a BFS (level order traversal). If a node with a given HD is seen for the first time, add it to the result. Ignore later nodes with the same HD (because only the top one is visible). After traversal, sort by HD and print nodes left to righ"See full answer