Programming Fundamentals and Code Quality Questions

Encompasses core programming skills, data structures, basic algorithms, language fundamentals, and code quality practices. Expect proficiency with arrays, strings, lists, hash maps or dictionaries, sets, common collection operations, basic sorting and searching algorithms, and tradeoffs between data structures. Understand control flow, functions and modular design, classes and object oriented programming concepts including encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism, exception handling, file input and output, and common language idioms for mainstream interview languages such as Python, Java, and C plus plus. Emphasizes writing clean, readable, maintainable code: meaningful naming, modular functions, small interfaces, handling edge cases and errors, logging and documentation, simple testing and debugging strategies, and awareness of time and space complexity for common operations. Candidates should be able to implement correct solutions, follow language specific idioms where appropriate, and demonstrate attention to code quality and readability.

MediumBehavioral

28 practiced

You find a function in a teammate's data cleaning script that swallows exceptions and returns None on any error. Describe your approach to code review feedback to improve error handling and ensure issues are visible in production, while being respectful and actionable.

MediumTechnical

34 practiced

Given a CSV with a 'timestamp' and multiple numeric feature columns too large to fit in memory, describe an approach for computing per-feature streaming mean and variance in a single pass with constant memory. Provide formulas and a short code sketch for online updates.

MediumTechnical

34 practiced

Explain how the time and space complexity of common operations differ between arrays, linked lists, and balanced binary search trees. Provide concrete guidance for which data structure you would use in a feature store index that needs fast ordered range queries and frequent inserts.

MediumTechnical

31 practiced

Write Python code to merge two sorted lists of timestamps into a single sorted list representing an ordered event log. Your implementation should be O(m+n) time and handle duplicate timestamps deterministically. Describe what you would change if the lists were lazily generated iterators rather than materialized lists.

MediumTechnical

30 practiced

You need to remove duplicate rows from a dataset but must preserve the first occurrence ordering. Describe an efficient algorithm in a single pass that uses O(n) time and O(k) extra space where k is number of unique rows. Provide pseudocode and mention how hashing and equality should be defined for complex row objects.

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