From a Data Structure Question to“Are You a Fit for Infrastructure Work” The interviewer was an engineer working on Kafka / streaming infrastructure, and the style was very clear from the beginning:they were not rushing you to write code, and they were not looking for a“perfect solution in the first minute.”Instead, the interview kept moving…

You must design a BusTracker that knows the ordered list of stations and where each bus currently is. nearestBusToStation returns the minimum number of forward stops from a given station until you meet any bus (or -1 if all buses are behind it). getBusLocation is just a lookup from bus id to its station. A…

You have a multi-level linked list where each node has next and optional down pointers. The goal is to“flatten”it into a single-level list by splicing every down chain between the parent node and the parent’s original next, preserving relative order within each chain. Recursion or an explicit stack both work: when you see a down,…

This is the same wildcard-binary problem in a shorter form: given a binary string containing ?, generate all possible binary strings by replacing each ? with 0 or 1. The examples show how a single ? doubles the outputs, and multiple wildcards lead to 2^k combinations where k is the number of ? characters. Bloomberg…

You are asked to implement a function that recursively walks through a directory and all its subdirectories, finds every .csv file, reads each line, extracts the second column, and sums all integer values found there. Files with other extensions should be ignored. The second column is guaranteed to contain integers. The final result is the…

You must implement the feedback mechanism of the Wordle game:Given a target 5-letter word and a user guess, return a 5-character feedback string where: A correct solution must also properly handle duplicate letters (e.g.,“staff”,“fluff”).

This problem asks you to segment a concatenated string into valid dictionary words. It is a classic word-break problem: greedily picking the longest prefix in the dictionary also works for this particular example, but in general you use dynamic programming or backtracking to find a valid segmentation. Bloomberg Interview Question: Count Ships in a Rectangular…

This problem asks you to design a command-line tool that, given a directory of Shakespeare text files and a target word, scans every file and reports:

This question asks you to merge overlapping and adjacent calendar intervals to produce a“busy view.”The key is to sort all intervals by start time and then sweep through them, merging when the next event starts before (or exactly at) the current merged interval’s end. Bloomberg Interview Question: Identify the First Process That Crashed You are…

This problem asks you to recursively or iteratively expand all ? positions in a binary string, producing every valid 0/1 combination. Each wildcard branches into two possibilities. A depth-first search (DFS) is the most natural solution. Bloomberg Interview Question: Maximum Travel Distance on a Circular Moon Route This is a circular route fuel-management problem. You…