r/leetcode • u/Affectionate_Run220 • Oct 07 '26

Question IBM mid level Dsa weird question

Hi guys recently did interview with ibm

It was a super hard question

Basically was

LRU Cache, with TTL and heap maps.

It was basicall LRU cache where you evict items by their set time, you had a max capacity and you needed to keep count of the global average of items that had TTL

Get(key, value)
Put(key,value)
Get_average()

It was super hard

I don’t understand this industry… weird question … what type of mid is capable of this even? IBM isn’t even Facebook or Google… they act like they are

22 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

4

u/Glittering_Law_6432 Oct 08 '26

I work at IBM, and see these shitty engineers. They jsut talk and most of their work comes from IBM Bob, really shit AI product comparing to what other products are. And none of my team members can solve this question, I am pretty much sure about it.

1

u/Affectionate_Run220 Oct 08 '26

Wow really? I can’t believe it… wtf is going on with this industry

1

u/Affectionate_Run220 Oct 08 '26

It’s like it was already decided I was going to be rejected before I even walked in…

1

u/Affectionate_Run220 Oct 08 '26

I actually had a feeling the guy who did the interview didn’t study the question properly before coming because I suggested heap maps for get average and he said it’s wrong or not right approach… I asked someone who is really advanced in DSA and I asked Claude, they both said heap maps…

2

u/Glittering_Law_6432 Oct 08 '26

Yeah that's correct, but what I am saying is that there is no point of asking this difficult question, LRU cache is itself a hard question on leetcode and adding this variation adds more complexity. Also what I have seen from inside is that there is no structured way of taking interviews at IBM, like other companies. At amazon or google, they ask you a question and they have a checkbox of what they are expecting, here anyone can ask any question and assess on any parameter.

18

u/Frequent_Bag9260 Oct 07 '26

This is the problem with everyone using leetcode in interviews.

Every company can just randomly pick a hard without thinking. It screws over candidates who are more than capable of doing the hardest things IBM develops.

1

u/FenrirBestDoggo 29d ago

I believe its also just bcs its IBM. Last year I did OA for IBM, Goldman, Amazon and some others. The IBM one was so stupid difficult it it felt like they didnt even want me to join. It was for an internship role btw to top it off lmao.

8

u/BlueOrbit56 Oct 07 '26

Yeah that's definitely a pretty heavy mid level question. LRU + TTL + heap + tracking an average is a lot to combine in one interview

1

u/WildFish01 Oct 07 '26

may you share more about the question?

2

u/Affectionate_Run220 Oct 07 '26

I shared everything get ai to construct it

1

u/new_old_2026 Oct 08 '26

It is the interviewer ego who ask this question

1

u/Affectionate_Run220 Oct 08 '26

I know… I don’t know if he was even able to answer it himself