Capital One Software Engineer Interview Experience — Four-Question OA Where the Rotting-Oranges BFS Ate My Time

Posting this a while after the fact.

I strongly recommend doing them in the order 1-2-4-3. People on the forum did say 3 was kind of hard, and I got stuck on it for ages. I'd have been better off doing 4. To explain: the easy questions up front take roughly 25 minutes, and then two mediums in 45 minutes is still pretty hard. You're better off getting full points on one of the last two questions..

Why do everyone else's questions look so easy? I read all the interview reports on the forum and hardly any of mine showed up.

You have to turn on your camera and microphone, and upload or take a photo of your ID.

1. Same as this one, it's on the forum:

   Ranking teams in a competition. 4 arrays:

   wins = [...]
   draws = [...]
   scored = [...]
   conceded = [...]
   

   Each index represents one team. Higher points rank first. There's a formula for the points:

   points = wins[i] * 3 + draws[i]

   If points are tied, compare goal difference:

   goal_diff = scored[i] - conceded[i]

   If goal difference is also tied, maybe then compare goals scored (scored). At the end, return the indices of first place and second place.

   I think it's called Find Top Two Teams.

2. Can't remember clearly. I think it was a really simple string question about counting chars.

3. I think it was a multi-source BFS, very similar to Rotting Oranges, but with a number of days as a parameter. It seemed like you output what the grid looks like after that many days.

4. This one has come up before. A robot is in a grid, and the robot can only go up, down, left, or right in one direction all the way to the end (meaning once the robot picks a direction it can't turn. It can't move in all four directions). The question is the maximum number of steps it can take (some rows and columns of the grid can't be entered, otherwise the robot gets destroyed).