Heaps, Queues & Streams

Heaps and queues come up at Intuit in two places. In the algorithm screen it's mostly top-K problems, like the top K elements of a list, the kth largest value in a tree, or the kth largest in a stream with the heap built by hand. Intuit has a reputation for favoring top-K, and priority-queue mediums show up on its phone screens. In the build rounds, the same top-K engine has been a Craft Demo prompt three times. Scores are published to a topic, a flat file stands in for it, and you return the top five with the players' names.

Producer-consumer comes up often too, always in Java. It has appeared in an Assessor round, inside an AI round, and as half of a low-level design round for a Software Engineer 1, which ended with a walk through every line of the shared queue. A senior phone screen asked a smaller version, a service desk where VIPs and regulars wait in separate lines and a ratio decides who goes next. All three are classes with state, which makes them closer to the Craft Demo than to a puzzle, and Intuit scores them the same way.

The Intuit angle

Each of these is a component with a contract, so the tests and the injected inputs count as much as the data structure. A queue that reads the wall clock or a leaderboard that opens its own file can't be tested. Pass the ranking key, the ratio and the clock in through the constructor or the call. Settle the tie rule and the empty-line rule before you code, since the panel usually asks about them once your first version runs. Then write two or three ordering tests without being asked, in JUnit if the round is in Java.

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