Google 2025 New Grad OA: Minimum Absolute Sum and Split-and-Sort Cut Points

Role: Software Engineer, New Grad / Early Career
Result: Passed the OA
Report time: October 2024

The OA contained two questions in 90 minutes. The original post supplied screenshots rather than a text transcription; comment solutions identify the two repeated Google assessment problems.

Question 1: Minimum Absolute Sum

Optionally negate at most one array value and minimize the absolute value of the final sum.

A commenter summarized the solution as evaluating abs(sum(arr) - 2 × num) for every element.

Practice: Minimum Absolute Sum

Question 2: Split and Sort

Count cuts where sorting the left and right portions independently and concatenating them produces a nondecreasing array.

A commenter used prefix maxima and suffix minima, counting positions where leftMax[i] <= rightMin[i+1].

Practice: Split and Sort

Comments asked whether candidates needed to write their own test cases, whether the camera was required, and what happened afterward, but no author answers were preserved.