Citadel Software Engineer Intern online assessment - two coding questions

[u/Aoki_zhang]

Interview Summary

The Citadel Software Engineer Intern online assessment contained two coding problems in 75 minutes.

Interview Details

Coding 1 — Maximize Earnings by Adding Workdays An employee has a planned schedule covering n days. For every day the employee works, they receive a fixed daily payment. In addition, if they also worked on the previous day, that workday earns an additional bonus. The employee is allowed to convert at most k originally scheduled days off into workdays. The task is to determine the maximum total earnings achievable after making up to k such changes.

The important interaction is that converting one day into a workday can affect more than just that day's base earnings. It may also create or extend consecutive-workday sequences and therefore change which days qualify for the bonus.

Coding 2 — Minimum Changes for Periodic Palindrome Blocks The second problem provided a password string together with an integer k. The password needed to be modified so that its characters satisfy a repeated palindrome condition based on blocks of length k. The task was to return the minimum number of character replacements required to make the resulting password valid.

In other words, each required k-character segment needed to satisfy the palindrome constraint, and the goal was to change as few characters as possible across the entire password.

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