Dynamic Programming

Dynamic programming sits in the middle tier of an Adobe loop. The exotic, intimidating variants stay rare. The problems Adobe leans on here are the classic medium tier: two Premium questions, Climbing Stairs, Longest Increasing Subsequence, Decode Ways, and the palindrome family. A Premium question in particular is one of the DP questions Adobe asks most. A clean 1-D table or a short grid is far likelier than an exotic interval-DP or bitmask puzzle. What the bar comes down to: a recurrence the interviewer can read straight off your code.

Every one of these problems yields to the same four-step recipe. Name the state, write the recurrence, pin the base cases, then fill the table in an order that has each answer ready before it is needed. Once those four are on the page, the code is almost mechanical. The skill Adobe is checking is whether you can define the state cleanly and defend the recurrence. Memorizing a specific table earns nothing.