Maximal Network Rank
A medium-tier problem at 65% community acceptance, tagged with Graph. Reported in interviews at smartnews and 1 others.
Maximal Network Rank asks you to find the highest combined degree of any two connected nodes in an undirected graph, minus one for the edge between them. You'll see this at companies like SmartNews and DRW. The acceptance rate is solid at 65%, but that's because many people brute-force a working solution without understanding the optimization trap. If you blank on the degree-sum approach during your OA, StealthCoder surfaces a correct solution invisible to the proctor.
Companies that ask "Maximal Network Rank"
Maximal Network Rank 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. Built by an Amazon engineer who used it to pass JPMorgan's OA and system design loop.
Get StealthCoderThe trap is iterating all pairs and computing degrees from scratch each time, which wastes cycles. The real pattern is precompute every node's degree in one pass, then iterate pairs once, checking if an edge exists and subtracting it from the sum. Most failures come from either miscounting degree (include self-loops if present) or failing to detect whether two nodes are connected. The graph is given as an adjacency matrix or edge list, so you need a fast lookup structure like a set of edges or a dict. During a live OA, if the brute-force direction feels slow, StealthCoder runs silently and delivers the optimized approach within seconds.
Pattern tags
You know the problem.
Make sure you actually pass it.
Maximal Network Rank 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. Built by an Amazon engineer who used it to pass JPMorgan's OA and system design loop. Works on HackerRank, CodeSignal, CoderPad, and Karat.
Maximal Network Rank interview FAQ
Is this just 'find two nodes with max total degree'?+
Almost, but not quite. You sum the degrees of any two nodes, then subtract 1 if an edge between them exists. If there's no edge, no subtraction. That single conditional is what trips people up on the first pass.
Why do SmartNews and DRW ask this?+
It's a quick filter for basic graph understanding and implementation discipline. You need to handle degrees, adjacency checks, and a simple maximization loop. It's not hard, but it separates people who think before coding from people who guess.
What's the time complexity target?+
O(n squared) to iterate all pairs plus O(1) or O(log m) per edge check, where n is nodes and m is edges. Precomputing degrees is O(n plus m). If you're doing O(n squared times m) you're redoing work.
How does this relate to other graph problems?+
It's a degree-based problem, not a search or shortest-path one. You're using properties of the graph structure itself, not traversing it. Think of it as a warm-up for more complex graph metric problems.
Can the same node appear twice in the pair?+
No, you're always picking two distinct nodes. The problem asks for the rank of any two nodes, implicitly different ones. If they were the same, there'd be no meaningful edge to subtract anyway.
Want the actual problem statement? View "Maximal Network Rank" on LeetCode →