Google Early Career OA: Exact Three-Step Token Movement and Common-Digit Groups

Role: Software Engineer, New Grad / Early Career
Result: OA completed
Report time: December 2025

The online assessment contained two questions in 90 minutes.

Question 1: collect coins with three-step moves

A board of length at most 100 contains empty cells ., tokens T, and coins C.

Each token:

• Moves only right
• Moves exactly three cells per move
• May move multiple times
• Cannot land on another token
• Collects a coin only when landing on that cell, not when passing over it

Each coin can be collected once. Return the maximum total coins.

Practice: Maximum Coins With Moving Tokens

Question 2: largest group sharing a digit

Given at most 100 two-digit numbers, return the largest group whose members all share at least one common digit.

For example, 55, 58, 25, 45 can form a group because every number contains 5, while 55, 66, 77 cannot form one common-digit group.

Practice: Maximum Elements With a Common Digit

A commenter said they had received the same two questions four days earlier, matching the repeated OA pattern in nearby firsthand reports.