Cigna · Primly Community

Cigna coding interview / online assessment: format and difficulty breakdown

hardware_hugo · 3 replies

just finished cigna's OA last week. took notes because i couldn't find anything current on this and the older posts were all from like 2022-2023 which seems outdated.

platform: HackerRank. no proctoring camera as far as i could tell, just time-tracked.

format: 2 coding problems, 90 minute window. there's also an optional "personality" section at the end which i skipped. not sure if that matters.

problem 1: manipulate a list of patient appointment records (represented as objects/dicts) and return a filtered + sorted output based on some criteria. felt like a real use case, not a pure algorithm puzzle. medium difficulty, maybe low-medium. i was done in 25 minutes.

problem 2: graph problem. find the shortest path through a dependency graph of insurance authorizations. this one had an actual bfs/dfs component. also medium, took me about 40 minutes. i passed 7 of 8 test cases and don't know why i missed the 8th.

Language: i used python 3, seemed fine. they say Java is preferred but didn't restrict it.

I passed to the phone screen so 7/8 test cases on the second problem was apparently enough. don't panic if you don't get 100%.

General sense: this isn't a grind-leetcode-hards situation. these problems felt like they were designed to find people who can write clean, working code for realistic tasks, not people who've memorized every dynamic programming pattern. if you're a new grad who knows your data structures basics you should be fine.

One thing: i got the OA invite 4 days after my recruiter screen. if you haven't gotten it after 7 days, email your recruiter. mine apparently got stuck in a queue.

3 replies

bootcamp_bri

This is really reassuring. I have an OA for Cigna next week and I've been grinding hards trying to prepare. Sounds like that might be overkill. Going to refocus on being clean and readable over being clever.

ml_mike

The graph problem makes sense given what they're actually building. Authorization chains in health insurance are literally DAG problems. Whoever wrote that question knows their domain.

qa_quinn

Missing one edge case in the test suite and still passing is actually pretty normal for big corporate OAs. They're not looking for 100%, they're looking for signal that you can code. The 7/8 probably just means you missed a null input edge case or something similar.