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There were 2 questions: 1 design and 1 implementation. The design was something like the following: you have a billion google searches a day, design a data structure which lets you pull out the top 100 unique ones at the end of the day.
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Software Engineer

Interviewed at Google

4.4★
Oct 20, 2009

There were 2 questions: 1 design and 1 implementation. The design was something like the following: you have a billion google searches a day, design a data structure which lets you pull out the top 100 unique ones at the end of the day.

Grid Illumination: Given an NxN grid with an array of lamp coordinates. Each lamp provides illumination to every square on their x axis, every square on their y axis, and every square that lies in their diagonal (think of a Queen in chess). Given an array of query coordinates, determine whether that point is illuminated or not. The catch is when checking a query all lamps adjacent to, or on, that query get turned off. The ranges for the variables/arrays were about: 10^3 < N < 10^9, 10^3 < lamps < 10^9, 10^3 < queries < 10^9.
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Software Engineer Intern

Interviewed at Dropbox

3.9★
Sep 29, 2016

Grid Illumination: Given an NxN grid with an array of lamp coordinates. Each lamp provides illumination to every square on their x axis, every square on their y axis, and every square that lies in their diagonal (think of a Queen in chess). Given an array of query coordinates, determine whether that point is illuminated or not. The catch is when checking a query all lamps adjacent to, or on, that query get turned off. The ranges for the variables/arrays were about: 10^3 < N < 10^9, 10^3 < lamps < 10^9, 10^3 < queries < 10^9.

Given a 1TB file of serialized 4 byte integers, and 2GB of ram, sort the integers into a resulting 1TB file. My interviewer was very collaborative in entertaining various solution ideas until we came up with a combo that would work performantly and reduce the number of passes over the 1TB file and intermediate files.
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Senior Software Engineer

Interviewed at Meta

3.6★
Oct 14, 2010

Given a 1TB file of serialized 4 byte integers, and 2GB of ram, sort the integers into a resulting 1TB file. My interviewer was very collaborative in entertaining various solution ideas until we came up with a combo that would work performantly and reduce the number of passes over the 1TB file and intermediate files.

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