I was asked exactly the same question 675. Cut Off Trees for Golf Event for the Technical Screening round at Apple for Senior Software Engineering position. No any example was given and the question was deliverately left vagued.

Without any hints, I was able to come up with the BFS Approach using PriorityQueue. The interviewer asked me to code after discussing about 10 mins for the solution. I was able to complete the coding in about 35 minutes. When I tried to run, I had few mistakes that I resolved. But I forgot to implement the visited logic so it ran endlessly and the interviewer asked me to stop there. I was then allowed to ask question for next 5 minutes.

Self Evaluation

I was happy for the solution I could provide in less than an hour for a Hard question that I never solved in Leetcode. The same night, I was able to solve it in less than 30 mins in leetcode.

Outcome

After few days, the recruiter reached out to me and told me that they don't see a strong fit for the position. He also mentioned that the outcome does not not impact my candidacy with any other recruiter or role at Apple. Not sure exactly what this means :-)

Few Lessons Learned:

1. I gave this technical screening after 1 hour break from my work. I was debugging in a huge codebase ( around 2 GB ) that whole day and I was very much tired when I appeared for the interview. So, it is advisable to take at least few hours break between your work and interview.

2. I read somewhere that you have to be actually pretty fast and flawless to implement common coding pattern solution such as BFS in this case. I had challenges with making sure that the search is within the bound of the given matrix.

3. On interview, they will make the question vague, does not provide examples and will not be given method signatures to implement; so it is better to simulate in that environment and not just rely on leetcode.

Next Step:
Practice