Background
I applied for IBM Confluent - Software Engineer (New Grad) and got the OA email in early November. The email said the link expires in 7 days and recommended finishing within 3 days.
Format
HackerRank, 75 minutes in total, split into 2 sections with one coding problem in each. No multiple choice.
You can pick your own language. I used Python.
Questions
Problem 1: array + counting over fixed-length windows.
- Given an integer array and a k, count how many contiguous segments of length k satisfy a certain monotonic condition.
- n goes up to 2×10^5, so re-checking every window from scratch will time out. You need to do it in a single O(n) pass.
- Difficulty is roughly LC easy, on the harder side.
Problem 2: string parsing + hash counting.
- From a string with a fixed format, pull out the characters and the numbers that follow them, aggregate, then output in order.
- The catch: a number can have more than one digit, so you can't read the digits one character at a time.
- Difficulty is LC easy.
How it felt
- Both problems are basic. No DP, no graphs.
- Before the OA I worked through about 40 recent IBM OA reports from this forum and from Xiaohongshu, and neither problem this time was a repeat.
- So the question bank is pretty big and it's hard to hit the exact problems. But the difficulty and style (arrays, strings, hashing, sliding window) match what the reports describe, so getting your fundamentals solid is enough.
Good luck everyone, hope you all get offers!
Discussion
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