Philips·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen
Jun 2026
Philips SWE interview with a pretty straightforward array/sorting problem. Nothing crazy but it's the kind of question where you can overthink the approach if you're not careful.
- Given an unsorted array and an integer k, return the element that would appear at position k if the array were sorted.
“My first instinct was to just sort it and index in, which works fine, but I spent a weird amount of time second-guessing whether they wanted something fancier like a quickselect.”