Meeting Rooms
A easy-tier problem at 59% community acceptance, tagged with Array, Sorting. Reported in interviews at Turo and 4 others.
Meeting Rooms is an easy problem that hits your screen during eBay and Google onsites more than you'd expect. You're given an array of meeting intervals and need to figure out if one person can attend them all. The trap is thinking you need a complex data structure or greedy algorithm when the actual solution is two lines of sorting and iteration. It's the kind of problem that's trivial once you see it, but candidates blank on it live because they overthink the interval logic. If you hit this during your assessment and can't remember the exact approach, StealthCoder solves it invisible to the proctor in seconds.
Companies that ask "Meeting Rooms"
Meeting Rooms 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. Built by an engineer who got tired of watching his cohort grind for six months and still get filtered at the OA stage.
Get StealthCoderThe problem is pure setup for a sorting insight: if you sort meetings by start time, you can check if any two adjacent meetings overlap in a single pass. Most candidates try to build a heap or use fancy data structures before realizing they just need to sort the array and compare consecutive meetings. The false starts happen because interval problems often feel like they demand careful state management. What actually kills you on a live OA is the off-by-one logic in the overlap check, not the algorithm itself. Turo, Palo Alto Networks, and Oracle all ask this, which tells you it's a screening problem, not a deep-dive. StealthCoder's hedge is that you don't need to rehearse the pattern if you've got a working solution available the moment you blank on whether it's 'end < nextStart' or 'end <= nextStart'.
Pattern tags
You know the problem.
Make sure you actually pass it.
Meeting Rooms recycles across companies for a reason. It's easy-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. Built by an engineer who got tired of watching his cohort grind for six months and still get filtered at the OA stage. Works on HackerRank, CodeSignal, CoderPad, and Karat.
Meeting Rooms interview FAQ
Why is this problem easy but so many candidates flub it in live interviews?+
The conceptual leap to sorting is obvious in hindsight, but candidates overthink interval overlap logic under time pressure. It's not hard algorithmically, it's hard because you're second-guessing yourself on a trivial comparison. Once you know to sort, the implementation takes two minutes.
Is Meeting Rooms still asked at top companies?+
Yes. Google and eBay report it, alongside Oracle and Palo Alto Networks. It's a frequent screening problem, not a rare artifact. You should expect it in at least one round if you're interviewing at those companies.
What's the trick to Meeting Rooms that I'm missing?+
There's only one trick: sort by start time first. After that it's a linear scan checking if the current meeting's end overlaps with the next meeting's start. The acceptance rate is around 59 percent because candidates miss this single insight and try to build heaps or use binary search.
How does Meeting Rooms relate to other interval problems?+
It's the simplest variant. You're not scheduling, merging, or counting conflicts. You're just checking if a sorted list has any overlap. It's the entry point before you tackle Meeting Rooms II or interval scheduling harder problems.
Is an array-based solution really enough, or do I need to know heap tricks?+
Array and sorting are enough. That's the actual problem. Heaps, trees, and other data structures are overkill and a sign you've overcomplicitated it. The 59 percent acceptance rate is partly candidates reaching for unnecessary tools.
Want the actual problem statement? View "Meeting Rooms" on LeetCode →