I met Bloomberg at my college's career fair, where I was asked a technical question: given a string and a dictionary, find all anagrams in that string. I gave them a terrible answer, but they took my resume.

A few days later, I got an email asking me to sign up for an interview. This was a standard technical interview. They asked me three questions that covered everything from C-style strings to hashing functions, and at the end, they asked me to come back in a few hours.

The second interview was also technical, but considerably more high-level. They asked me two questions:

• One in which I had to create a string using a certain pattern and then test my algorithm.
• One in which I had to implement my own circularly linked list class to solve a certain problem (see below).

They asked me to come back the next morning.

The third interview was half-technical, half-behavioral, which was interesting. In the technical part, the interviewer asked me to create a program to encode a series of characters using a certain encoding standard and solve a problem. The behavioral interview was a breeze – just a few questions about how I had heard of Bloomberg, why I decided to interview with them, etc.

Less than a week later, I got a call with their offer!

Halloween has just happened, and all of the kids in the neighborhood have candy.

Five of them are standing in a circle comparing stashes, when one of them (Kid 0) gets the idea to steal his neighbor's (Kid 1's) candy.

Kid 1 gets upset and runs away crying.

Kid 2 sees Kid 0 stealing from Kid 1, thinks that he could do that too, and steals Kid 3's candy.

Kid 4 sees Kid 2 and steals from Kid 0, and so on and so forth until there's only one kid left.

Given n children, find the index of the last kid remaining.