The entry-level loop: CS core subjects, DSA, one language in depth, and the HR round that campus candidates treat as an afterthought.
Treat it as a process gap, not a grudge. Find out where and when decisions are made, get your team's constraints in front of the deciders before the meeting through short written proposals with a comment window both time zones can reach, and escalate a specific costly decision, not the people who made it.
In a transfer, atomicity means the debit and credit commit together or not at all, consistency means declared constraints such as a non-negative balance still hold, isolation stops concurrent transactions seeing or overwriting each other's half-done work, and durability means a confirmed commit survives a crash.
Bitmask DP keeps the cheapest cost for every subset of workers already used. The number of set bits says which task comes next, so there are 2^n states with n moves each, O(2^n * n) time and 2^n memory. At n = 20 that is about a million states, where trying all 20! orders is hopeless.
Plain Dijkstra minimises cost alone, so it can return a cheap route with too many stops, and settling each city once discards a dearer route that still has stops to spare. Make the state city plus edges used, or run Bellman-Ford for exactly K + 1 rounds, each reading only the previous round's distances.
For one grid, number of islands is a flood fill: each unvisited land cell starts a BFS or DFS, O(rows x cols). For land arriving cell by cell, rerunning that is too slow, so use union-find. Each new cell adds one island, and each union with a neighbour in a different set removes one, at near-constant amortised cost.
Binary search for the rotation point by comparing the middle element with the right end. If it is larger, the break lies to the right; otherwise it is at mid or before it. That is O(log n). With duplicates an equal comparison says nothing, so you drop the right end, and the worst case becomes O(n).