Daily Temperatures
A medium-tier problem at 67% community acceptance, tagged with Array, Stack, Monotonic Stack. Reported in interviews at Airwallex and 26 others.
Daily Temperatures is a medium-difficulty array problem that shows up in OAs across 27 companies including Airwallex, Okta, ServiceNow, and Grab. You're given a list of daily temperatures and need to return, for each day, how many days until a warmer temperature arrives. The naive nested-loop approach will time out. This is the kind of problem where the trick makes the difference between passing and failing the assessment. If you blank on the pattern during a live OA, StealthCoder solves it invisibly while you stay calm.
Companies that ask "Daily Temperatures"
Daily Temperatures 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 for the engineer who has done the work but might still blank with a webcam pointed at him.
Get StealthCoderThe trap is iterating forward for each element and searching ahead. The real solution uses a monotonic stack to process temperatures in a single pass. You maintain a stack of indices for temperatures in decreasing order. When you see a warmer day, you pop colder temperatures off the stack and record the distance. This pattern feels unnatural the first time you see it, which is exactly why it gets asked. The acceptance rate of 67% suggests plenty of candidates understand the concept but stumble on implementation or edge cases during the live assessment. StealthCoder is your hedge for the moment you can't quite remember how to set up the stack or handle the indexing.
Pattern tags
You know the problem.
Make sure you actually pass it.
Daily Temperatures recycles across companies for a reason. It's medium-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 for the engineer who has done the work but might still blank with a webcam pointed at him. Works on HackerRank, CodeSignal, CoderPad, and Karat.
Daily Temperatures interview FAQ
Is Daily Temperatures actually hard or just annoying?+
It's medium difficulty because the brute force passes easy test cases but fails on large inputs. The monotonic stack pattern isn't intuitive without prior exposure. A 67% acceptance rate confirms most candidates can solve it, but the margin for implementation error during a live OA is real.
Do I really need the monotonic stack trick or can I use a different approach?+
A nested loop works conceptually but will timeout on large arrays. The monotonic stack is the intended solution and runs in linear time. Since companies like ServiceNow and Grab ask this, they expect the optimized approach.
How does this relate to the broader monotonic stack topic?+
Daily Temperatures is the canonical introduction to monotonic stacks. It teaches you to maintain a stack in decreasing order and pop elements when a larger value arrives. Once you lock this pattern, you'll recognize it in next-greater-element and similar problems.
What's the most common mistake candidates make on this?+
Off-by-one errors in the distance calculation and forgetting to handle temperatures with no warmer day ahead. Also, candidates often pop too many or too few elements from the stack depending on how they set the loop condition.
Is this problem asked frequently across major companies?+
Yes. It appears in reports from 27 companies spanning Airwallex, Okta, Agoda, ServiceNow, Grab, and others. It's a stable medium-difficulty ask, especially in phone screens and initial online assessments.
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