The Skyline algorithm for packing 2D rectangles

Great writeup. Sucks when this gets asked in a coding interview to be solved in 15min :)

To be fair, in an interview context they’re probably looking for what you would implement in the mvp just to avoid getting blocked, and a brief acknowledgement that it’s an academic problem and once you have data to understand it better you’ll select and implement an appropriate algorithm after design review with colleagues.

In theory, yes, but in practice...

I’ve interviewed with several companies that asked me this specific question [1], including Facebook, ByteDance, LinkedIn, and a particular team at Apple (not my current team). The interviewers, perhaps somewhat optimistically [2], expected a fully working solution. They gave me about 40 minutes—more than the 15 minutes mentioned in the original comment—but I definitely needed the first 10-15 minutes just to get a brute-force solution running. The rest of the time was spent refining the approach and addressing 1-2 additional requirements to pass a set of visible tests.

It was challenging, but not in a traditional engineering sense. It felt more like an ACM competition [3].

Fortunately, programming skills aren’t the only thing companies assess these days. With over a decade of work experience, behavioral (experience-based) interviews now play a larger role in the final hiring decision. That said, depending on who conducts the technical portion of the interview, you could still be rejected if your code doesn’t work.

[1] https://leetcode.com/problems/the-skyline-problem/descriptio...

[2] Them, being so young (<10 YoE), consider LeetCode a panacea

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_programming

thanks for linking that leetcode link; the entire time i've been reading about it i thought it was a separate programming language used for these "challenges" at workplaces. I'm not a programmer by trade so i was surprised to see python is usable, too.

Sorry for asking you (i'm not, just shouting into the ethernet) - when people say they take a few months off to "grind leetcode" do they just go through the problems on that site? When an employer issues a challenge it's going to be exactly worded as when you practiced? like, the potential employer in your experience gave you that URL and said "go"?