Mock interview (practice III) - Award budget cut

March 17, 2016

Julia likes to figure out best ways to help herself grow as a software programmer. She likes to find peers to work together, solve the algorithm problems. She never had chance to interview others as a software programmer before 2016, she started to practice now.

So far, she did practice 4 times.
Lessons learned:
Learned to calm down, and set a small goal for each interview:
1. First 5-10 minutes, work on a test case, come out the solution to solve the test case; <- People are complaining about Julia about this.
2. Communicate the ideas using the test case, make sure that both are clear how to solve the problem;
3. Ask permission to write code
4. Code for test case, and then, extend the solution, fix the bug etc.

Mock Interview 3 -    Award budget cut

The awards committee had planned to give n research grants this year, out of a its total yearly budget.
However, the budget was reduced to b dollars. The committee members has decided to affect the minimal number of highest grants, by applying a maximum cap c on all grants: every grant that was planned to be higher than c will now be c dollars.
Help the committee to choose the right value of c that would make the total sum of grants equal to the new budget.

Given an array of grants g and a new budget b, explain and code an efficient method to find the capc.
Analyze the time and space complexity of your solution.

Julia got feedback:

YOU AS AN INTERVIEWEE

•Problem Solving:answering correctly, without much help or hints

Strong

Got it with only few hints

•Coding:bug-less, clean, readable, reusable and maintainable code

Ninja

Flawless code: readable, reusable & maintainable

•Communication:clarity of your answers and line of reasoning

Okay

I was able to understand some parts

•Working Together:peer's motivation to be your colleague

Yes

It will be nice

•Creativity:original or innovative thinking

Picasso!

Re-invented the solution

•Things you did well:

- You started out with examples and walked through them to find a solution to the problem - You considered the base cases (arr == null, arr.Length <= 0, sum < b…), this is very good practice - You came up with the sorting idea by yourself - You found the final complexity of the algorithm - You nailed the linear search

•Things you should work on:

- You calculated the sum at each call of the function, making the algorithm O(n^2) - You got a little bit mixed up with the indices, but overall you did it correctly - You need to work on communication, and mainly english as I had trouble understanding you at times (and you had trouble understanding me too); I assume you'd do much better with a native speaker though, it was a bit harder for me to understand your accent because english is not my main language