Google Early Career OA: Moving Tokens by Three and Common-Digit Groups

Role: Software Engineer, Early Career
Result: Completed for practice after joining another company
Report time: February 2026

The candidate applied in October 2025, completed Google's hiring assessment, and received the OA in February 2026. By then they had already joined another company and treated the assessment as coding practice.

OA question 1: moving tokens and coins

A one-dimensional board string contains tokens and coins. Every token moves only to the right and advances exactly three positions at a time without stopping between those positions. Return the maximum number of coins the tokens can collect.

A commenter proposed splitting positions into three residue tracks and, within each track, using the leftmost token to collect reachable coins to its right. The candidate confirmed that interpretation.

A displayed test case still led to disagreement among commenters about whether the expected result should be 2 or 3; the candidate did not resolve that separate example.

Practice: Maximum Coins With Moving Tokens

OA question 2: largest common-digit class

Given a collection of two-digit numbers from 10 to 99, numbers belong to the same class when they share at least one digit. Return the size of the largest class.

The displayed example [34, 44, 19, 91, 28] -> 4 appears inconsistent: 34 and 44 form one pair, while 19 and 91 form another. Commenters raised this issue, but the candidate did not clarify the expected grouping rule or output.

Practice: Maximum Elements With a Common Digit