Engineer Interview Questions

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How many race heats are needed to find the 3 fastest pinewood derby cars out of a field of 8, if only 4 cars can run at a time (assuming that every car will always run the way/speed and each lane is exactly equivalent)?
Jun 13, 2012

How many race heats are needed to find the 3 fastest pinewood derby cars out of a field of 8, if only 4 cars can run at a time (assuming that every car will always run the way/speed and each lane is exactly equivalent)?

Question was "Given a pattern and a string input - find if the string follows the same pattern and return 0 or 1. Examples: 1) Pattern : "abba", input: "redblueredblue" should return 1. 2) Pattern: "aaaa", input: "asdasdasdasd" should return 1. 3) Pattern: "aabb", input: "xyzabcxzyabc" should return 0. I saw someone else had a similar question, but it was much much easier as the other candidate was given spaces between words to help identify individual words to pattern match.
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Software Engineer

Interviewed at Dropbox

3.9
Oct 2, 2014

Question was "Given a pattern and a string input - find if the string follows the same pattern and return 0 or 1. Examples: 1) Pattern : "abba", input: "redblueredblue" should return 1. 2) Pattern: "aaaa", input: "asdasdasdasd" should return 1. 3) Pattern: "aabb", input: "xyzabcxzyabc" should return 0. I saw someone else had a similar question, but it was much much easier as the other candidate was given spaces between words to help identify individual words to pattern match.

They gave me the below question to solve in 30 mins. Based on customer research, we know that our guests get confused when they are searching for accommodation and they found multiple hotels with the same name in the same city. To avoid this, we want to create a tool to identify "confusing" cities: cities with at least 3 hotels with the same name. Given a list of tuples (hotel_id, hotel_name, city) return a list of all "confusing" cities. Input: [ {hotel_1234, "Sheraton", "Amsterdam"} , {hotel_1000, "Sheraton", "Buenos Aires"} , {hotel_1001, "Hilton", "Amsterdam"} , {hotel_1002, "Royal Palace", "Bogota"} , {hotel_1003, "Hilton", "Amsterdam"} , {hotel_1004, "Sheraton", "Buenos Aires"} , {hotel_1005, "Sheraton", "Buenos Aires"} ] Output: [ "Buenos Aires" ]
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Site Reliability Engineer

Interviewed at Booking.com

4.1
Aug 6, 2019

They gave me the below question to solve in 30 mins. Based on customer research, we know that our guests get confused when they are searching for accommodation and they found multiple hotels with the same name in the same city. To avoid this, we want to create a tool to identify "confusing" cities: cities with at least 3 hotels with the same name. Given a list of tuples (hotel_id, hotel_name, city) return a list of all "confusing" cities. Input: [ {hotel_1234, "Sheraton", "Amsterdam"} , {hotel_1000, "Sheraton", "Buenos Aires"} , {hotel_1001, "Hilton", "Amsterdam"} , {hotel_1002, "Royal Palace", "Bogota"} , {hotel_1003, "Hilton", "Amsterdam"} , {hotel_1004, "Sheraton", "Buenos Aires"} , {hotel_1005, "Sheraton", "Buenos Aires"} ] Output: [ "Buenos Aires" ]

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