Cover Hotels
Reported by candidates from Microsoft's online assessment. Pattern, common pitfall, and the honest play if you blank under the timer.
Microsoft's Cover Hotels question hit the OA circuit in March 2024, and candidates are blanking on it. You've got an invite, probably 48 hours to go, and you need the core insight fast. This is a greedy or dynamic-programming problem dressed up in hotel language. The trick is recognizing whether you're picking a sequence of non-overlapping intervals or optimizing some cost metric. StealthCoder will sit invisible during your assessment and feed you the pattern the moment you see the full problem statement. Know the shape before you start coding.
Pattern and pitfall
Cover Hotels is fundamentally about selecting hotels or time slots to maximize coverage or minimize cost while respecting constraints like overlap or distance. The pattern hinges on sorting by a key dimension (arrival time, price, or location) and then either greedily picking non-overlapping candidates or building up a DP table to track the best solution at each step. The gotcha is confusing when to sort by start vs. end vs. cost. Walk through a small example by hand first: sort, then simulate forward, tracking which hotels you've picked and what's still covered. Most candidates rush and miss that overlaps matter or that there's a subtly different constraint hiding in the problem text. StealthCoder's real value here is catching that constraint in the live OA when panic sets in and you've re-read the problem three times.
Drill it cold or hedge it with StealthCoder. Either way, don't walk into the OA hoping you remember the trick.
You can drill Cover Hotels 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 Microsoft's OA.
Microsoft 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.
Cover Hotels FAQ
Is Cover Hotels a greedy or DP problem?+
Usually greedy. Sort by one dimension (often by start time or cost), then iterate forward picking the best choice at each step. DP is rare here unless the problem asks for minimum cost across all valid covers, in which case you track best[i] as the optimal cost to cover up to hotel i.
What's the most common mistake on this problem?+
Forgetting to handle overlaps correctly or misreading what 'cover' means. Does it mean no overlapping bookings, or does it mean consecutive coverage of a time range. Re-read once before coding. Sort, then walk through your logic on paper.
How do I solve this in 15-20 minutes?+
Identify the constraint (overlap, distance, time range). Sort by the key dimension. Simulate forward with a loop, keeping a pointer or a set of picked hotels. Code it straightforward; don't over-engineer. Test on the example they give.
Does Microsoft ask this repeatedly, or was it a one-off?+
Interval and selection problems are Microsoft staples, especially in phone screens and OAs. The exact wording changes, but the pattern repeats. If you nail intervals, you'll see it again.
What if I blank on the algorithm during the OA?+
That's what StealthCoder is for. It'll read the problem and confirm the pattern in seconds. You get a reset without losing time. Write the greedy or DP skeleton it suggests, then fill in the loop logic.