Test Guidelines: Minimum list of categorized problem that you have to solve

In this post I will share my experience about the Job exam question patterns:

In our country, most of the software firms and others are not concerned about the computer programming skill for any job candidates. They are mostly concerned about your expertise of any framework or platform like.net, android, IOS, PHP, etc. But if you want to work with a multinational or world recognized tech giant like Samsung, Google, Apple, Amazon and many more, they must judge you by your computer programming skill. Recently, some Offshore Multinational Software company has been started their business in our country, and they have also included this judgment system in their recruitment system to judge your computer programming and algorithm skill. As we know Software Engineering and Computer Programming is not exactly the same thing. An Expert software engineer may not be a good computer programmer. But good computer programmers who have vast knowledge of the algorithm can be a world-class Software Engineer as he knows how to run a program with low memory resource and in optimized time duration. That’s why Tech giant Companies hire good computer programmer and trained them how to be a good software developer.

Now days there are lots of good online judge system like UVA, Code chef, Code forces, Top coder, Hacker Rank , LightOj, a2oj etc. Among them UVA is one of the best online judge system for all the programmers. They have most categorized problem sets. Today I’ll share a list of problems set by solving those you will get a clear idea about the job exam question pattern. This is not the Bible, but as much as the problem you will solve from this list, your probability of getting passed in job exam will be increased for sure. Let’s start…

Firstly, you have to go the UVA’s Complementary tool's website called uHunt. On this web page there is a text box named UVa username. Type your UVA user name, for example yeasir007 and clicked the view button. You will find user statistics below.

Now scroll down until you found the title name Competitive Programming Exercises. Under this title there is a chart like below image. Click on the 3^rd (3^rd Edition’s Exercises) then click on Problem Solving Paradigms.

Here you will find a list of problems. Total number of categorized problem is given below:

• Complete Search – 24 problems 
•  Dynamic Programming -21 problems 
•  Divide and Conquer- 7 problems
• Greedy- 9 problems

Now click on Graph under 3rd (3^rd Edition’s Exercises). From this list you have to solve according to the list below:

• All-Pairs Shortest Paths- 6 problems   
•  Single-Source Shortest Paths (SSSP)- 15 problems 
•  Minimum Spanning Tree- 15 problems 
• Graph Traversal- 18 problems (In this list Flood Fill, Topological Sort and Finding Strongly Connected Components are most important)

As I already said this is not the Holy Book, so you have to solve the problems as much as you can. Here are some important topics below to practice.

      

       A.      Recursion (Brute Force)

          1. Permutation: O(n!) solution to problems.         
          2. Combination: O(nCr) solution to problems
          3. Subset: O(2n) solution to problems                   
          4. Simulation: Variable time complexity.

        * Board game simulation                                         
        * Job scheduling simulation                                   
        * Rotating/Reflecting/Copying 2D Array simulation

      B.      Graphs

          1. Graphs represented with 2D Array                    
          2. DFS                                                                           
          3. BFS: Queue implementation  might be required

      

      C.      Basic algorithms:                                                 
          1.  O(n2) array sorting                                              
          2. Queue/Stack data structures                              
          3. Successive sums                                                  
          4. Any algorithms you can find which are not hard to implement or do not require any concept

You can practice those problems from the online judge websites that i have mentioned above. You can also find some pure graph category problems under 1st Edition's Exercises (switch to: 1st)/Graph

• Depth First Search - 12 problems 
•  Breadth First Search- 6 problems
• Kruskal's - 6 problems
• Dijkstra's - 3 problems 
•  Floyd Warshall's- 6 problems
• Bellman Ford's- 3 problems 
•  Ford Fulkerson's / Edmonds Karps's - 6 problems

Finally you don't have to solve all of these problems. Try to solve the problem from every category to get a clear concept about how to solve this kind of problem. One thing to reminder, your probability of getting pass is proportional to the problem you have solved.

Special Note:

• Participate in every contest arranged by code forces. If you can achieve level 1000 to 1500 in code forces, I’m sure you can solve any kind of problem in our country perspective.
•  Learn how to work with visual studio for 'C' and 'CPP' coding, and Eclipse for coding with java. 
•  Practice solving problems with only <stdio.h> and <iostream> headers, while implementing required algorithms yourself.
• You are not allowed to use STL (like string, vector, maps etc). You have to implement all of those basic functions yourself.

 

Thanks for your fortitude. Happy coding. For further query, please leave a comment below.