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Determine Reporting Relationships

GoogleSoftware Engineer · Technical Screen
MediumSoftware EngineerTechnical ScreenCoding & Algorithms

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This question evaluates understanding of hierarchical relationship modeling, transitive inference across relations, and dynamic data-structure design for tracking manager and peer links.

Build an in-memory organization model that supports three operations on employee IDs:

  1. add_manager(a, b): employee a is the direct manager of employee b.
  2. add_peer(a, b): employees a and b share the same direct manager.
  3. is_manager(a, b): return whether employee a is a manager of employee b.

The answer should account for relationships that can be inferred from prior operations. For example, if add_manager(m, x) and add_peer(x, y) were previously recorded, then is_manager(m, y) should return true. You may assume the input is logically consistent and does not create invalid cycles in the org chart.

Explain how you would design the data structures and implement these operations efficiently.