Meeting Rooms II: minimum rooms for overlapping intervals.
The fewest meeting rooms you need equals the highest number of meetings active simultaneously. That reframing is the entire interview; two O(n log n) solutions drop out of it, and the tie-handling catches careless candidates.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
The fewest meeting rooms you need equals the highest number of meetings active simultaneously. That reframing is the entire interview; two O(n log n) solutions drop out of it, and the tie-handling catches careless candidates.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.
