Best Team With No Conflicts
A medium-tier problem at 50% community acceptance, tagged with Array, Dynamic Programming, Sorting. Reported in interviews at Morgan Stanley and 0 others.
Best Team With No Conflicts is a medium-difficulty dynamic programming problem that appears in Morgan Stanley interviews. You're given a list of people with ages and heights, and you need to find the subset with the maximum total height where no two people conflict. A conflict means one person is strictly younger and strictly shorter than another. At 50% acceptance, it's hard enough to trip candidates who don't spot the sorting trick. If you hit this live and blank on the approach, StealthCoder solves it invisibly in seconds, surfacing a working solution before you panic.
Companies that ask "Best Team With No Conflicts"
Best Team With No Conflicts is the kind of problem that decides whether you pass. StealthCoder reads the problem on screen and surfaces a working solution in under 2 seconds. Invisible to screen share. The proctor sees nothing. Made for the engineer who has done the work but might still blank with a webcam pointed at him.
Get StealthCoderThe trap here is trying to greedily pick people or use brute force on combinations. The real pattern: sort by one dimension (usually age), then treat it as a variant of the longest increasing subsequence problem on the other dimension. After sorting by age, any pair where the earlier person has a higher height than the later person automatically satisfies the no-conflict constraint. Standard DP logic applies from there. Most candidates either miss the sorting step entirely or don't realize that sorting collapses the conflict condition into a single dimension to check. This is where the problem jumps from intuitive to solvable. If you're stuck mid-interview, StealthCoder gives you the sorted DP framework to code against.
Pattern tags
You know the problem.
Make sure you actually pass it.
Best Team With No Conflicts recycles across companies for a reason. It's medium-tier, and most candidates blank under the timer. StealthCoder is the hedge: an AI overlay invisible during screen share. It reads the problem and surfaces a working solution in under 2 seconds. Made for the engineer who has done the work but might still blank with a webcam pointed at him. Works on HackerRank, CodeSignal, CoderPad, and Karat.
Best Team With No Conflicts interview FAQ
Is this still asked at Morgan Stanley?+
Yes. It's in their reported interview questions. Medium difficulty problems like this one are common in their OAs, especially for roles requiring data structures chops. It's not a warm-up; expect it to take real thinking time.
What's the main trick I'm missing if I get stuck?+
Sort the array first (usually by age). Once sorted, the conflict definition simplifies to a single dimension check (height). Then it becomes a standard DP problem similar to longest increasing subsequence. No sorting, no solution.
How does this differ from classic longest increasing subsequence?+
LIS works on a single sorted dimension. This problem gives you two dimensions (age and height), and conflicts are defined on both. Sorting by one collapses it to a one-dimensional DP. The state and transition logic are nearly identical once you make that connection.
What's the time complexity and can I optimize further?+
Standard DP approach is O(n^2) with O(n) space. That passes comfortably for most constraint sizes. Binary search optimizations exist but are rarely needed at this acceptance rate. Focus on correctness and the sorting insight first.
How hard is 50% acceptance really?+
Hard enough that coding it from scratch without the sorting insight is nearly impossible. But once you see the pattern, it's a clean DP problem. Most failures come from missing the setup, not the implementation. That's where pre-interview prep or a live safety net matters most.
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