Interview Overview - Interviewer Role: Interviewer

Interview Process The candidate was presented with a coding problem involving movie ratings and similarity metrics. The candidate initially proposed building a graph and calculating connectivity, estimating a worst-case time complexity of O(N²). Upon being prompted for optimization, the candidate suggested using a Union-Find approach to group similar movies into connected components, then identifying the component containing the starting movie and retrieving the Top K movies by rating.

The interviewer questioned the limitations of the Union-Find approach. The candidate struggled to respond during the interview. The candidate encountered difficulties while coding the solution, requiring hints from the interviewer. Due to time constraints, the implementation was not fully completed, and the candidate was asked to explain their thought process instead.

Questions and Topics

1. Given a list of movies with ratings and a list of similarity relations between movies (where similarity is transitive), find all movies similar to a target movie and return the top K movies ranked by rating.

Candidate Notes Upon review, the candidate noted that since the task only requires processing from a specific starting movie, a BFS approach would be more efficient than the proposed Union-Find method.

Given a list of movies with ratings and a list of similarity relations between movies, where similarity is transitive, find all movies similar to a target movie and return the top K movies ranked by rating.