Smallest Sufficient Team
A hard-tier problem at 55% community acceptance, tagged with Array, Dynamic Programming, Bit Manipulation. Reported in interviews at tcs and 0 others.
You need to pick the minimum set of people from a roster where each person has a list of skills, and together they cover every required skill. Google and TCS have asked this. It looks deceptively simple until you realize the brute force approach explodes combinatorially. The trick is to encode required skills as a bitmask and use DP to find the shortest path through skill combinations. Acceptance is 55%, meaning most people either miss the bitmask insight or get tangled in state transitions. If this lands in your OA and you blank on the bitmask encoding, StealthCoder surfaces the working solution invisibly while you stay on screen share.
Companies that ask "Smallest Sufficient Team"
Smallest Sufficient Team 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 engineer who got tired of watching his cohort grind for six months and still get filtered at the OA stage.
Get StealthCoderThe core insight is to treat the set of required skills as a bitmask where each bit represents one skill. Then use DP where dp[mask] stores the minimum team needed to achieve that skill combination. For each person, you compute their skill bitmask and iterate through all existing DP states, updating new states by adding that person to the team. Common failure point: trying to brute force all 2^n subsets of people, which times out. Another trap is not recognizing that you need to track which actual people form the optimal team, not just the count. The DP transition is tight: merge person i's skills with all reachable masks, prune dominated states, and back-track the solution at the end. If you've only drilled greedy or simple DP, this pattern won't feel natural. StealthCoder handles the bitmask bookkeeping in seconds if you get stuck mid-assessment.
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Smallest Sufficient Team 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. Built by an engineer who got tired of watching his cohort grind for six months and still get filtered at the OA stage. Works on HackerRank, CodeSignal, CoderPad, and Karat.
Smallest Sufficient Team interview FAQ
What's the actual hard part of this problem?+
Most solutions fail on the DP state definition or the backtracking step. You have to track not just the minimum size but also which people comprise the team. Many candidates code the bitmask transition correctly but can't reconstruct the actual answer at the end. Also, recognizing that you need bitmask DP at all is non-obvious if you're used to greedy or simpler DP patterns.
How does the acceptance rate compare to other HARD bit manipulation problems?+
At 55%, this is above-median for HARD problems, which typically sit 40-50%. This suggests the bitmask encoding is learnable once you see it, but the DP state design trip up a lot of first-timers. TCS and similar companies value this because it tests DP under exponential constraints.
Is this still asked at major tech companies?+
TCS is the reported source. Problems of this type (bitmask DP for minimum coverage) are common in medium-to-large enterprise and backend roles. Not as frequent at pure FAANG consumer interviews, but it appears in systems interviews and optimization-heavy roles.
What's the time complexity and why does brute force fail?+
Optimal DP solution is O(n * 2^k) where n is team size and k is skill count. Brute force of all 2^n subsets of people times validation is O(2^n * n * k), which explodes fast. You hit TLE around n=20 unless you prune aggressively. The bitmask DP prunes early by only exploring reachable skill states.
How does Bit Manipulation relate to the other topics here?+
Bitmask is your encoding language for the DP state. Array is your input structure. Dynamic Programming is the search strategy. You iterate through the array of people, compute their skill bitmask, and use DP to find the smallest team. Without bitmask, the DP state space becomes intractable.
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