Problem Solving and Communication Approach Questions

Covers the practice of solving technical problems while clearly communicating the thought process. Includes clarifying requirements, asking targeted questions, decomposing problems into subproblems, proposing brute force and optimized approaches, stating assumptions, discussing time and space complexity and trade offs, walking through examples and edge cases, and narrating debugging and recovery when stuck. Also includes collaboration during problem solving, readiness to accept hints, and ability to explain reasoning so others can follow and learn. This area is commonly tested in coding interviews and whiteboard scenarios where the candidate's communication of reasoning and process is as important as the final solution.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

You are mentoring a junior developer who is stuck on a concurrency bug that only appears under stress. Outline a step-by-step coaching plan to guide them through reproducing the bug, writing deterministic tests or harnesses, isolating the root cause, and ensuring they own the fix. Explain how you would keep them engaged and what learning artifacts you'd produce.

HardTechnical

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You are given a code snippet and failing test logs. Explain step-by-step what you would check first, how you'd search for likely root causes in the repository, write a regression test, and craft a pull request description that communicates the fix. Provide an example git commit message and PR checklist items.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Implement in JavaScript a function that returns all unique pairs of indices (i, j) such that nums[i] + nums[j] == target. Before coding, clarify whether duplicate pairs or order matters, show the brute-force solution and then implement an optimized hash-based approach, and explain its time/space complexity and edge cases.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

You plan a complex refactor touching several services. How would you narrate the plan to stakeholders: describe rollback plans, feature flags, monitoring/alerting changes, canary rollout strategy, and which metrics you would track to consider the refactor successful. Provide a sample rollout checklist.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Implement a function (language of your choice) that finds the longest contiguous subarray with sum <= k. Before coding, discuss the brute-force O(n^2) approach and how to optimize to O(n) when all numbers are non-negative using sliding window. Explain how the presence of negative numbers changes the approach and your assumptions.

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