SDE - Intern

I used the fact that each array is already sorted, so the minimum element of an array is at index 0 and the maximum element is at the last index. My initial approach was to find the global minimum and global maximum across all arrays to maximize the absolute sum, but I quickly noticed an edge case where both values could come from the same array, which violates the condition of choosing elements from two different arrays. To handle this, I tracked not only the minimum and maximum along with their array indices, but also the second minimum and second maximum. If the global minimum and maximum came from different arrays, I used them directly; otherwise, I compared the absolute sums of the global minimum with the second maximum and the global maximum with the second minimum, and returned the larger valid result.

I was asked to find the second-highest salary from an employee database, so I first clarified whether duplicate salaries should be considered. To handle this correctly, I used a subquery to filter distinct salary values and exclude the highest salary, and then selected the maximum from the remaining results. This approach ensured accuracy even when multiple employees shared the same salary and avoided relying on brute-force logic.

In this problem, there were two tables: customers and orders, and the requirement was to display customer details for orders with a cost above 500. I approached this by joining the customers table with the orders table using the customer ID as the common key, and then applying a filter condition on the order cost. This ensured that only customers with qualifying orders were selected while still returning complete and relevant customer information.

Tip 1: Be honest.
Tip 2: Be confident.
Tip 3: Read some standard HR questions beforehand.