|
Practice thousands of problems and hundreds of interview questions
Smash the interview and land your dream job. Sharpen your soft and hard skills to land your dream job.
Implement a single-writer, multiple-reader, writes-always-succeed data structure.
You're writing a trading system that requires market data to be written immediately to a buffer. The alternative is to wait for readers to be done before writing. This adds latency to the market data write-thread and increases the risk that the internal network card buffer overflows and starts dropping packets.
Packet drops cannot be tolerated since they are expensive to recover from and delay trading activity. This data structure will be used in your feedhandlers, freeing the market data thread with instantly-completing writes.
At this level of design, requirements are often vague. As a developer, your job is to understand the context that this data structure exists in, and build it while being able to explain the trade-offs of your decisions..
Ultimately, there will be submissions that are more efficient that others, and so you should aim for your submission to achieve a runtime and memory usage that is on the efficient frontier.
Context
- Your data structure will contain small types that are default and copy constructible.
- Given that writes must be instant, your implementation cannot use any threading primitives that would lead to waiting (e.g.
std::mutex,std::condition_variable, etc). - There will only ever be one writer, but there can be multiple readers. A writer can write at the same time that readers read!
- If nothing has yet been written, reads can still succeed, but callers will inspect the return value to understand whether the read was successful.
Test cases
| Test | Description |
|---|---|
write-while-read | Writing is allowed while values are being read. Poorer implementations that are otherwise correct will suffer here. |
read | Read the last written value. |
read-many | Read a series of updates. |
empty-read | You read before anything was written. |
Placements at top companies.
Practice in your language
Real interview problems from top tech companies. Master the fundamentals that interviewers actually ask.
Three by three
What is the value of grid after running this code?
grid = [[0] * 3] * 3
grid[0][0] = 3Why getcracked?
In the age of AI, the knowledge round will be the defacto technical screen. Stay ahead of the competition!
800+ problems (and counting)
Our library grows daily with real questions contributed by users fresh from their interviews. You'll practice the exact problems companies are asking right now, not outdated ones from years ago.
Rankings and benchmarking
See exactly where you stand with our live leaderboard and percentile rankings. We track your progress against thousands of other candidates, so you'll know when you're ready to ace the real thing.
You are hired!
Congratulations on your new job!
Proven results, real job offers
Join hundreds of users who have landed dream jobs at companies like SpaceX, Jane Street, and Citadel. A small investment in prep can lead to life-changing offers and huge salary jumps.
How we compare
See what makes getcracked different from traditional coding interview platforms.
| Features | Neetcode | Leetcode | AlgoExpert | getcracked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Data Structures | ||||
| Contrived Toy Coding Puzzles | ||||
| Catered Playlists | ||||
| Detailed Solutions | Partial | Partial | ||
| Ranking and Benchmarking | ||||
| Operating Systems | ||||
| Concurrency | ||||
| Computer Architecture | ||||
| Design Patterns | ||||
| Practical Coding Problems | ||||
| Behavioral Interview Videos | ||||
| Exclusive Quizzes | ||||
| You'll get cracked. |
Pricing
Unlock advanced filtering, 400+ premium questions, video interview guides, and exclusive Discord-community access.
Free
Gauge your knowledge with commonly asked interview questions.
Premium(-33%)
Premium access to the entire platform.
Lifetime
Never worry about price-hikes. Lock in this rate once.
Real success stories
See how our members: turned a $20 subscription into a $200K+ career.
This platform helped me solidify key concepts and refine my problem-solving skills, ultimately leading to 7 incredible job offers. The questions are well-structured and thought-provoking, making them perfect for reviewing and reinforcing knowledge. Instead of just memorizing answers, I was able to deeply understand the underlying principles, which proved invaluable during interviews.
Just wanted to say thanks for building the platform — i've been using it quite a bit during my prep, and it really helped me a lot. recently got an internship offer at a hft (more infra-focused and not swe), and even though the exact questions didn't come up, the OS and networking ones on your site gave me a solid sense of the level of depth i needed. also helped guide what to google and dive deeper into, which i think came through in my interviews — got feedback that i seemed curious and well-prepped.
😭😭😭😭 kicking myself for not grinding the getcracked coding questions harder just had jr C++ backend engineer interview today for adtech company, asked to implement a shared pointer , did okay for most things but messed up the copy assignment operator then ran out of time i also got asked some architecture questions, OS questions, etc. luckily i did okay on those due to grinding getcracked for those topics
I was trying to pivot my career to low level and performance critical, but wasn't having a lot of luck getting responses because of my Cloud-focused job experience. I replaced my nightly doomscroll with getcracked and found that even though I had a working knowledge of C++ and operating systems, I was lacking in the fundamental areas that really impress employers. I put together a study plan with the help of the resources list on getcracked, and within a couple months I had two competing offers (both 400K+ TC)! I've been at my new job for a few months now and I'm surprised how often I need to know the things that I learned from getcracked.
Just received an offer from [Tier 1 Quant Firm]!! 600K+ TC. legit think I impressed them with my knowledge of CPU architecture/ cache structure/things like false sharing etc. half of which I got from getcracked. also have final round [Tier 2 Quant Firm A] and had to cancel final round with [Tier 2 Quant Firm B] cuz no time 😂. also, the discord came in clutch. lots of cracked people in there. The coding problems were especially useful in helping solidify concepts in a practical way. got asked to implement vector and blew away the interviewer when I voluntarily added move / copy semantics. I ended up teaching him about std::construct_at in C++20 as an alternative to placement new.I'm heading into an internship role at a leading trading firm. Getcracked was instrumental in solidifying my systems knowledge and filling critical gaps in my understanding. The impact was clear in my interviews—one interviewer told me I was "one of the most technically impressive undergraduates he's come across when it comes to systems knowledge". The platform's focus on fundamental concepts like operating systems, computer architecture, and low-level programming gave me the depth I needed to stand out in highly competitive technical rounds. I'm making $175 per hour with a 10k sign-on in my new role.
FAQ
Find answers to common questions about our platform, pricing, and process.
Land your dream job
Join 70,000+ developers who are getting hired faster with getcracked.
