F5·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen
May 2026
Coding round for a Software Engineer role at F5Networks. One problem, hashtag frequency stuff, looked approachable at first but the sorting tie-breaking tripped me up a bit.
- Given two arrays of tweets and their timestamps, plus a current time and a time window, return the top 3 most popular hashtags (tokens starting with '#') from tweets within the inclusive time range. Sort by descending count, then lexicographically ascending on ties.
“The filtering part was fine, just check if the timestamp falls in the range and parse out tokens starting with '#'.”