CareerCup

What is a pointer?

Given a Starting Node and Ending Node in a Graph where each Node has a pointer to its parent and all its children nodes. Find all the leaf nodes between the Starting and Ending Node.

There are n petrol bunks arranged in circle. Each bunk is separated from the rest by a certain distance. You choose some mode of travel which needs 1litre of petrol to cover 1km distance. You can't infinitely draw any amount of petrol from each bunk as each bunk has some limited petrol only. But you know that the sum of litres of petrol in all the bunks is equal to the distance to be covered.
ie let P1, P2, ... Pn be n bunks arranged circularly. d1 is distance between p1 and p2, d2 is distance between p2 and p3. dn is distance between pn and p1.Now find out the bunk from where the travel can be started such that your mode of travel never runs out of fuel.

Find the median value of two sorted arrays.

How long it would take to sort 1 billion numbers? make any assumptions you wanted.. assume the computer would have more than 4 GB of RAM, so the array would fit in memory in its entirety, and the machine would run at 4 GHz.

Given n non overlapping intervals and an element. Find the interval into which this element falls.

Explain and write the code for Concurrent Read, Exclusive Writer

When would you use BST over a hash, assuming perfect hashing

Simulate a seven-sided die using only five-sided

How to partition text into words, where there are no space characters in the stream of

Given a list A with n elements, produce a list B with n elements such that the ith element of B is equal to the product of all elements except the ith in list A. Example: Given list A = [1, 2, 3], make a function f(x) such that f(A) = [6, 3, 2].

Given two events with integer start and end times, E1 = (s1, e1), E2 = (s2, e2), implement a quick boolean check to see if the events overlap.

Discuss psuedo-code then implement Shell Sort.

Suppose you have a huge file (few million entries). Each line has a name; an id and age, all three separated by a space. How do you go about sorting this and writing this in a sorted order in another file? Of course you can't read the whole thing in memory.

How many trailing zeros are there in n factorial?

Given an array having first n ints and next n chars.
A= i1 i2 i3 ... in c1 c2 c3 ... cn
Write an in-place algorithm to rearrange the elements of the array as:
A = i1 c1 i2 c2 ... in cn

Given two binary trees T1 and T2 which store character data, duplicates allowed. You have to devise an algorithm to decide whether the T2 is a subtree of T1. T1 has millions of nodes and T2 has hundreds of nodes.

Find a square root of a number without using the square root function.

How do you build address bar in say gmail. i.e. if you press 'r' then you get all email starting from 'r', and if you press 'ra' then you will get emails starting from 'ra'.

Given an array of sorted strings that also contains empty string at some locations, find a string in this array.

["a" "" "" "" "" "b" "c" "" "" "" "d" ""]

Print all combinations of M members of a set of N elements in a sequence such that each set can be obtained from the previous set by deleting one member and adding one member.

Given a value and a binary search tree.
Print all the paths(if there exists more than one) which sum up to that value. It can be any path in the tree. It doesn't have to be from the root.

Determine which level has the maximum number of nodes in a N Ary Tree?

You are provided with a stream of integers, design a data structure to store the number of occurrences of each integer.

Explain the trade offs between multi threaded and single threaded programming. Imagine you have N threads and N resources - how do you ensure no deadlocks occur?

You are given a the source to a application which is crashing when run. After running it 10 times in a debugger, you find it never crashes in the same place. The application is single threaded, and uses only the C standard library. What programming errors could be causing this crash? How would you test each one?

Given an integer between 0 - 999,999, print an English sentence that describes the integer.

Given 1234, print out One Thousand, Two Hundred and Thirty Four.

Implement a Gapped Buffer Class.

What is Heap Corruption?
How do you know if a program has Heap Corruption?
How do you debug it?

Whenever you open a file, describe all the steps that the OS goes through .. directory list, inum, inode, data sector.

Given a document of text, return the 10 most frequently occurred words in the text.

Implement Breadth First Search for Binary Tree.

Implement Find and Delete for binary tree.

Generate a maze. There should be a path from the entry point to the exit point.

Create a B-Tree given a large sorted array of integers. Each Node should be around 4KB.

When does the Operating Systems do a Context Switch?

What is Context Free Grammar? What is it used for?

What are the differences between User Mode vs Kernel Mode?

How do you determine the size of an object in Java?

-What are DLLs? Why do we use them?
-How does DLL work? Can anybody call methods written in DLLs ?
-What are static and shared Library? Which is fast and why?

Given an unsorted array of positive integers and an integer N, return N if N existed in the array or the first number that is smaller than N.

Give a O(N) algorithm.

What is Introsort?

What are the advantages and disadvantages of function lining?

Given a node in a binary tree, find the next largest node.

Given an integer, exchange the Most Significant Bit with the Least Significant Bit and vice versa.

Given a string s1 and a string s2, write a snippet to say whether s2 is a rotation of s1 using only one call to strstr routine?

(eg given s1 = ABCD and s2 = CDAB, return true)
(given s1 = ABCD, and s2 = ACBD , return false)

Name all the registers in the X86 machine.

Develop an algorithm to find out all valid combinations of n brackets. Like for n =3 possible combinations can be ((())) or ()()() or (()()) and so on.

What is Perfect/Universal hashing?

When should you use Quicksort, Mergesort, and Heapsort? What are some advantages one has over the other?

What is a recursive mutex lock?

What is the "placement new" operator in C++?

What happens when you type a URL into a browser?

Design a web crawler. Avoid indexing web pages more than once.

There is a building of 100 floors. If an egg drops from the Nth floor or above it will break. If it's dropped from any floor below, it will not break. You're given 2 eggs. Find N, and minimize the number of drops for the worse case.

What is buffer overflow and how do you exploit it?

Explain the relationship between Equals and Hashcode in Java.

Given 2 squares on a 2 dimensional plane, find a line that would cut these two squares in half.

String XMLEncode(String str). There are a few characters in XML that can't be represent and need to be replaced with a certain special string.

For small dataset (less than 200 elements), why is unsorted array has better performance than binary tree? This wasn't the case 20 years ago. (Hint: It has to do with computer architecture.)

Write the code for quadratic equation.. The equation is given. I identify all the corner cases.

Networking Questions. Design a chatroom.. allow encryption.

Write the macro for Exclusive Or logical operator.

Questions about C++/Java and Design Patterns.

Design the classes for Tic Tac Toe. Implement make next move method for the computer player and make sure that the computer wouldn't lose.

Design the game Othello. Write the code to check whether someone has won the game.

Design the classes and data structures for a parking lot

Implement class Stack using a linked list.

void removeChars(char *str, char *delete). Remove characters in str that is in delete.

Find nth to the last node in a single linked list.

Look within the book. Each person can look at 20% of the book at a time. Only 70% of the book can be served to all users. Design the data structures for this.

Count the number of set bits in an integer - gave him 4 different ways to do this.

Implement Atoi(char *str)

Reverse all the words in a string.

Merge two sorted array

Maxdepth of binary tree recursive and iterative solution.

Define the following terms: static and dynamic binding, virtual table

Given a binary tree of integers, What is the average? average = sum/count. What if the binary tree has a loop?

Given a binary tree where each node's value is a COLOR. A clump is formed when more than 3 COLORS are adjacent to each other. Return the total number of clumps in a binary tree.

Given a chunk of memory
1. Implement malloc.
2. Implement free.

Add numbers in base n

A disk is partioned into two hemispheres colored in black and white and the disk is rotating.By appropriate positioning of sensors (A sensor can read the disk near it as black or white) we need to find the direction of the motion of the disk.

What's wrong with this code:
unsigned int i;
for (i = 100; i >= 0; --i)
printf("%d\n",i);

Count the number of ON bits in an integer.

Write atoi(const char * chr)

Describe in english what this code do?
( (n & (n-1)) == 0)

What does the keyword volatile mean in C?

Describe in English what this code does:
((n & (n-1)) == 0)

Explain Virtual Memory. What is the TLB?

Design Patterns - Talked about Singleton, Observer, Abstract Factory.. more

Asked about Java OOP.

Gave the code for reversing a linked list. Asked me to identify all the bugs.

Gave me some C code for a compression algorithm. Identify bugs.

Why do I want to work for Bloomberg?

Asked me about XML. XML was on my resume but I don't know much about it. I only have used it a few times. Note to self - take anything that I don't know too well about off my resume.

Asked about unix commands

What's the difference between malloc and calloc? What's static methtod in C?

Describe a binary tree, its properties, and name all of its traversal algorithms.

Discussed OOP concepts and gave examples.

What is difference between Java and C++.

What's the difference between Linked List and ArrayList?

Why is Virtual Memory important?

Asked me basic unix commands (wc, grep, ls, ps, top, find) and which unix text editor I use.

Implement a Garbage Collector for C++.

How does the compiler know which virtual table to point to when the base class pointer points to its derided class object?

What's XD bit? How does buffer overflow work?

Computer Architecture: Virtual Memory, Interrupts, Cache, Hazards, CISC vs RISC.

When do you use a double pointer?

Draw all the components of a computer!

Behavior questions: favorite internship, projects...

How do I go about motivating my team?

Why do I want to work for JP Morgain and Various typical behavioral questions.

Asked me about OS projects.

Why do I want to study Computer Science?

Asked what I do on my free time? I said Yoga. He wants me to sell him yoga.

Asked me my knowledge of J2EE.

What are some languages that you're proficient at?

What did you learn on your previous internships.

How do you go about learning a new language?

Tell me about yourself, your coursework.

Your favorite class and professor.

Case Study: The IRS wants your team to build an application to do taxes. Write the initial proposal. Design and architect your solutions. You got to discuss this in details.

What are some advantages and disadvantages of building your software on top of open source projects?

What kind of project are you interested in?

3rd Interview - Technical. You have 5 basketball teams. You want them to play each other only once. Each team plays once a week. If a team plays a home game this week, They should play a aways game the coming week. How many weeks does it take for all the teams for play each other?

Behavoiral questions: Leadership skills. How did you convince your to accept your ideas? Conflict resolutions.

Asked about Stack, Stack Frames, Heap, variable allocations and destructions.

Asked about Interrupts and exceptions.

Talked about Garbage Collector. Explained Mark & Sweep Algorithm.

Where do you see youself in 5 years?

Tell me a time where you showed your leadership skills

A time where you showed initiative.

How do you keep your team motivated?

Your hardest class.

Behavorial questions. How do you motivate your team? How do you tell a co-worker that he/she aren't doing a good job.

Differences between process and thread

what are core dumps? What kind of editor do you use to look at core dumps?

virtual and pure virtual functions. Virtual inheritance.

Basic data structures questions. Linked List, Arrays, Splay Tres, Binary Tree, Hash. Discuss when you should use Hashing over Tress.

Questions about Linkers and Loaders.

Questions about OOP, Design Patterns, Java, and C++. Just basic OOP questions like Pure Virtual Functions, Virtual Pointer Table, Abstract classes, Interfacce, Inheritance, Polymorphism.

Questions about past experience. Teamwork and leadership skills.

What's the difference between a process and a thread?

What is smart-pointer in C++

100 closed lockers. You begin by opening all 100 lockers. Next, you close every second locker. Then you go to every third locker and close it if it is open or open it if it is closed (call this toggling the locker). After your 100th pass of the hallway, in which you toggle only locker number 100, how many lockers are open?

You have an array of strings. How would you sort the strings so that all the anagrams are each other?

than the default option. 10, 20,50, 100, 200 would be awesome :)

For some who don't know what PIE is, PIE stand for Programming Interviews Exposed. It's a very popular interview book. I highly recommend it. I have interviewed with plenty high companies and I usually get at least 1 technical question that this book talked about. The 2nd edition of this book was released recently.