Technical Screen

A Huge YAML Merge Problem and a Knapsack That Wants Quickselect

GoogleSoftware Engineer · Intern · Technical Screen · Oct 2026

The first-round interviewer was really nice, but the problem was super long. Reading and understanding the problem plus the examples can take maybe 20 minutes. Roughly, it is merging two trees (YAML files), where every node has merge rules, and there are a lot of rules. The approach is DFS plus rule matching. The second-round interviewer gave me a knapsack problem, but for this one DP or DFS with…

Shared by a candidate · reported Oct 2026. Interview formats change; use it as a guide, not a script.