Cherry Pickup
A hard-tier problem at 38% community acceptance, tagged with Array, Dynamic Programming, Matrix. Reported in interviews at Akuna Capital and 6 others.
Cherry Pickup is a hard dynamic programming problem that shows up in interviews at Akuna Capital, Atlassian, Cisco, and J.P. Morgan. You're given a grid and need to collect cherries traveling from top-left to bottom-right, then back again, but you can only move right or down. The catch: cells are visited only once, even though you're making two passes. Less than 40% of candidates solve it in a live setting. Most people start with a naive recursive solution and hit time limits. This is where StealthCoder matters: if you freeze on the state compression trick during your assessment, it surfaces the working approach in seconds, invisible to the proctor.
Companies that ask "Cherry Pickup"
Cherry Pickup is the kind of problem that decides whether you pass. StealthCoder reads the problem on screen and surfaces a working solution in under 2 seconds. Invisible to screen share. The proctor sees nothing. Made by a working FAANG engineer who treats the OA the way companies treat hiring: as a game with rules you should know.
Get StealthCoderThe core trick is reframing two separate journeys as a single simultaneous walk. Instead of solving 'go down, then go back up', you solve 'two people walk down at the same time, collecting cherries without duplication'. This collapses the state space dramatically. Standard DP approach: track position of both travelers and compare their coordinates to avoid double-counting. The unintuitive part: you don't need to reconstruct the actual paths, just the maximum value. Most candidates waste time trying to simulate backtracking or write inefficient memoization that doesn't compress the state properly. Array and Matrix operations are mechanical once the state model clicks. If you haven't drilled the constraint transformation (two journeys into one simultaneous walk), StealthCoder provides the working solution on screen during the live assessment.
Pattern tags
You know the problem.
Make sure you actually pass it.
Cherry Pickup recycles across companies for a reason. It's hard-tier, and most candidates blank under the timer. StealthCoder is the hedge: an AI overlay invisible during screen share. It reads the problem and surfaces a working solution in under 2 seconds. Made by a working FAANG engineer who treats the OA the way companies treat hiring: as a game with rules you should know. Works on HackerRank, CodeSignal, CoderPad, and Karat.
Cherry Pickup interview FAQ
Is Cherry Pickup still asked at FAANG-adjacent companies?+
Yes. It appears in interview reports from Akuna Capital, Atlassian, Cisco, Flipkart, J.P. Morgan, Snowflake, and Zomato. Hard DP problems on grids are standard at quant and infrastructure firms. Don't expect it to disappear soon.
What's the actual trick I need to nail?+
Reframe two separate journeys as simultaneous movement down the grid. Track both positions in a single state. When both are at the same cell, count the cherries once. This compression makes the problem solvable in O(n^3) instead of exponential backtracking.
Why do most people time out on this?+
They build a recursive solution with poor memoization or try to actually simulate a forward-backward path. Without recognizing the simultaneous-walk reformulation, you end up with redundant state dimensions and massive search space. The state table must be carefully indexed.
How does this relate to other DP matrix problems?+
Unlike basic grid path-sum problems, Cherry Pickup requires constraint transformation (two journeys become one). You still use Array and Matrix iteration, but the state modeling is the hard part. It sits a tier above standard DP on grids.
What percentage of people solve this live and how much prep time do I need?+
38% acceptance rate means you're in hard territory. Expect 3 to 5 hours of focused drilling if you've done grid DP before, longer if this is your first constraint transformation problem. Many candidates need a walkthrough of the state model.
Want the actual problem statement? View "Cherry Pickup" on LeetCode →