Most Profit Assigning Work
A medium-tier problem at 56% community acceptance, tagged with Array, Two Pointers, Binary Search. Reported in interviews at NetEase and 1 others.
Most Profit Assigning Work is a medium-difficulty problem that appears in live assessments at NetEase and DoorDash. You're given jobs with difficulty and profit values, and a worker with a skill level. The task: assign the worker to jobs they can handle and maximize profit. The naive greedy approach fails. You need to pair two pointers with sorting to avoid O(n^2) pitfalls. If this problem hits your live OA and you blank on the pairing strategy, StealthCoder solves it in seconds, invisible to the proctor.
Companies that ask "Most Profit Assigning Work"
Most Profit Assigning Work 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 Amazon engineer who got tired of watching qualified friends bomb OAs they'd solve cold in an IDE.
Get StealthCoderThe trick is sorting both jobs and workers, then using two pointers to greedily assign the most profitable job the worker can do without re-scanning. Most candidates try filtering jobs for each worker independently, which TLEs. The correct pattern: sort jobs by difficulty, sort worker abilities, then slide a pointer through jobs to track the max profit reachable at each skill level. This converts an O(n log n + m log m) sort into a linear pass. Greedy works because once you know the max profit up to difficulty d, you never need to revisit easier jobs. Candidates often miss that you're not matching workers to specific jobs, just extracting the best profit threshold per ability level.
Pattern tags
You know the problem.
Make sure you actually pass it.
Most Profit Assigning Work 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 Amazon engineer who got tired of watching qualified friends bomb OAs they'd solve cold in an IDE. Works on HackerRank, CodeSignal, CoderPad, and Karat.
Most Profit Assigning Work interview FAQ
Is the two-pointer approach required or can I binary search?+
Both work, but two pointers is cleaner. You can binary search for each worker's max reachable job, but two pointers avoids repeated lookups and keeps code simpler. The sorting step dominates either way, so pick the approach you debug fastest under time pressure.
What's the most common mistake?+
Filtering jobs for each worker separately, leading to O(n * m) or worse. Candidates also forget to track the running max profit as they slide the pointer. You need to know the best profit available at difficulty d before moving to d+1.
Does it matter which array I sort first?+
No. Sort jobs by difficulty and workers by ability, or vice versa. The key is that both are sorted and you iterate through one while advancing a pointer in the other. Pick the order that feels natural to you; the complexity stays the same.
How hard is this compared to other medium problems?+
With acceptance around 56%, it's slightly easier than the median medium. Most failures come from the greedy insight, not edge cases. Once you see the two-pointer pattern, implementation is straightforward.
Will this pattern appear in other problems I'll see?+
Yes. Any problem combining sorted arrays with greedy optimization uses this two-pointer or binary search idea. Container with Most Water and Trapping Rain Water follow similar logic. Master the sorting plus pointer combo here and you'll recognize it again.
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