Minimum Cost to Set Cooking Time
A medium-tier problem at 41% community acceptance, tagged with Math, Enumeration. Reported in interviews at GE Digital and 0 others.
You get a timer with two buttons, and you need to hit an exact cooking time in minimum button presses. Sounds simple until you realize the greedy approach fails. This problem is asked at GE Digital and has a 41% acceptance rate, which tells you most people either miss the math insight or waste time on brute force. You need to see that the problem isn't really about timers at all, it's about finding the shortest path through a state space using basic enumeration. If you hit this live and blank on the trick, StealthCoder surfaces the solution in seconds, invisible to the proctor.
Companies that ask "Minimum Cost to Set Cooking Time"
Minimum Cost to Set Cooking Time 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 trap is thinking you must increment the minutes dial, then the seconds dial separately, adding costs linearly. Wrong. You're actually finding the minimum cost to reach your target time by considering all reachable states and their costs. The insight: you can set minutes and seconds to any value, then press a button to start. The real cost comes from the button presses and the final time adjustment. Most people enumerate paths manually and timeout. The efficient approach uses math to calculate the cost of reaching nearby valid times, then picks the minimum. Common pitfall: not realizing you can overshoot and come back, or undershoot and round up. You need to check boundary cases and adjacent states systematically. StealthCoder is the safety net when the enumeration logic isn't crystallizing under pressure.
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Minimum Cost to Set Cooking Time 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 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.
Minimum Cost to Set Cooking Time interview FAQ
Is this really just a greedy button-mashing problem?+
No. Greedy fails because the cheapest path to your target time often involves overshooting or undershooting, then adjusting. You have to enumerate candidate times near your target and calculate the actual cost for each, picking the minimum. It's a math problem disguised as a timer problem.
What's the acceptance rate telling me?+
41% acceptance means most people either struggle with the enumeration logic or miss the mathematical insight entirely. It's not a hard problem algorithmically, but it requires you to see the trick: the answer isn't always the direct path. You need to think sideways.
Do I need dynamic programming for this?+
No. Enumeration with math is enough. You're iterating through a small set of candidate times (your target plus neighbors), calculating the cost to reach each using modular arithmetic or simple math, and picking the minimum. No DP needed.
What edge cases kill most solutions?+
Off-by-one errors when wrapping around the dial, forgetting to check times you can reach by overshooting, and miscalculating button press costs when you mix minute and second increments. The boundaries between 59 and 00 are brutal.
Is this still asked in interviews?+
GE Digital has reported it, and it stays in rotation at companies that test math and enumeration together. Not a household name problem, but the pattern of hidden math under a real-world wrapper shows up frequently in assessments targeting engineers in hardware or embedded systems.
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