The DSA Phone-Screen Filter

Plenty of Postman loops skip a pure algorithm round entirely. When one appears, it is a short phone screen. The problems stay easy-to-medium, solved in a shared editor. Clearing one gets you to the round that decides the loop. That's the machine-coding round, where you build a working, DB-backed REST API on your own machine. One candidate called the absence of a DSA gauntlet "a breath of fresh air." Take that literally. This screen is a gate to clear.

That changes how you prepare for it. You do not need a hundred-problem grind; you need to move cleanly through a handful of standard problems without fumbling the mechanics. The ones below recur in Postman screens, and each is a classic with a well-known optimal shape. Get the pivot logic, the string parsing, and the rotated binary search automatic, explain your reasoning as you go, and spend the rest of your prep on the build-a-service round that carries the weight.