Solve two coding assessment tasks
Company: Squarepoint
Role: Software Engineer
Category: Coding & Algorithms
Difficulty: hard
Interview Round: Take-home Project
The online assessment contained two coding problems:
1. **Maximize store revenue**
You are given an integer array `quantity` of length `n`, where `quantity[i]` is the current inventory of product `i`. Selling one unit of product `i` earns revenue equal to its current inventory immediately before the sale. After the sale, `quantity[i]` decreases by 1. There are `m` customers, and each customer buys exactly one unit. Assume `0 <= m <= sum(quantity)`. Choose which product to sell to each customer so that the total revenue is maximized. Return the maximum possible revenue.
2. **Find top word frequencies**
You are given a string `text`. Count how many times each word appears, treating uppercase and lowercase letters as the same. A word is defined as a maximal sequence of English letters, and any non-letter character should be treated as a separator. Return at most 3 distinct words, sorted by descending frequency. If two words have the same frequency, sort them in ascending alphabetical order. If the text contains fewer than 3 distinct words, return all of them.
Quick Answer: This question set evaluates algorithmic optimization and string-processing skills: the first problem focuses on maximizing cumulative revenue from limited inventories (optimization and greedy reasoning with dynamic value updates), while the second focuses on case-insensitive text parsing, word frequency counting, and frequency-based ordering.