Max Meetings
Reported by candidates from Akuna's online assessment. Pattern, common pitfall, and the honest play if you blank under the timer.
Akuna pulled this in August and it's a classic scheduling problem disguised as a meetings question. You're optimizing which meetings to attend to maximize count, which means greedy wins. The trap is thinking you need dynamic programming or brute force when a simple sort by end time will cut through it. If you blank on the exact greedy move during the OA, StealthCoder runs invisibly and feeds you the pattern so you can code with confidence instead of freezing.
Pattern and pitfall
The greedy strategy is sort meetings by end time, then iterate through and pick each meeting that doesn't overlap with the last one you selected. This works because finishing early means more room for future meetings. The common miss is sorting by start time instead, which leaves gaps. The math is clean: one pass through the sorted list, O(n log n) total. When you hit this live and your mind blanks on whether to sort start or end, StealthCoder's there as a safety net to remind you the pattern and get you unstuck without the proctor knowing you needed help.
Drill it cold or hedge it with StealthCoder. Either way, don't walk into the OA hoping you remember the trick.
You can drill Max Meetings cold, or you can hedge it. StealthCoder runs invisibly during screen share and surfaces a working solution in under 2 seconds. The proctor sees the IDE. They don't see what's behind it. Made for the candidate who got the OA invite this morning and has 72 hours, not six months.
Get StealthCoderRelated leaked OAs
This OA pattern shows up on LeetCode as video stitching. If you have time before the OA, drill that.
You've seen the question.
Make sure you actually pass Akuna's OA.
Akuna reuses patterns across OAs. Made for the candidate who got the OA invite this morning and has 72 hours, not six months. Works on HackerRank, CodeSignal, CoderPad, and Karat.
Max Meetings FAQ
Is this the classic interval scheduling problem?+
Yes. Same algorithm you'd see on LeetCode as 'Video Stitching' or 'Interval Scheduling Maximization'. Sort by end time, greedily pick non-overlapping intervals. Akuna expects you to know it or derive it under time pressure.
What's the most common mistake candidates make?+
Sorting by start time instead of end time. Intuitive but wrong. Starting early doesn't help if you're stuck in a long meeting. End time is what opens the door for the next meeting.
Do I need to handle time zones or weird formats?+
Unlikely. Akuna usually keeps input clean: arrays of tuples like [start, end] or two separate arrays. Parse once, sort, iterate. No surprise complexity in I/O.
How much time should I spend on this question?+
10-15 minutes if you know greedy. 20-25 if you're deriving it. The sorting is straightforward; the trick is recognizing the pattern. That's where most time goes.
Should I test overlapping intervals in my walkthrough?+
Yes. Test a case where meetings overlap at edges, like [1,3] and [3,5]. Depending on problem definition, [3,5] either starts when the other ends (counts as non-overlapping) or doesn't. Clarify this assumption in your code or ask.