Here’s a quick summary of the recent TSMC OA (HackerRank) sessions I assisted students with.
Overall impression: the questions aren’t difficult, but they do test your patience, stability, and code cleanliness.
It’s exactly the type of assessment where you finish thinking, “That’s it?” — but you can still trip over small details.
Overall Experience
TSMC’s OA doesn’t involve trick questions or psychological traps.
It’s a very straightforward engineering-style assessment combined with a set of basic knowledge questions.
Time is sufficient, but if your implementation gets messy, you may get stuck debugging your own code.
Coding Section (Two Problems)
The style is consistent: practical engineering logic, not algorithm-heavy.
Typical directions include:
- String cleaning: removing characters, validating formats, merging fields
- Array simulation: step-by-step state transitions, like building a mini-system
- Counting/HashMap tasks: dedup, grouping, frequency
- Sorting + logic checks: sometimes small interval-related logic
Key characteristics:
✔ Long inputs with verbose rules
✔ Medium code volume
✔ Heavy testing of boundary cases
✔ Focused on clean, stable implementation rather than clever algorithms
Multiple-Choice Section (Variable Amount)
Covers a wide range of topics:
- Basic data structures
- Fundamental algorithms
- Time complexity
- Basic probability & math
- Some compiler / language fundamentals
Difficulty is moderate, but the breadth makes it easy to lose points without preparation.
Common Failure Points
From several students’ attempts, these are the most frequent issues:
- Skimming the problem and missing a tiny rule
- Getting lost midway through implementation
- Forgetting edge cases in string handling (empty input / special characters)
- Reversing steps in simulation problems
- Thinking “this is easy” → spending too much time debugging
TSMC OA fits this pattern: not hard, not fancy — but you must stay steady.
Don’t Struggle Alone
The TSMC OA is very passable if your reasoning is clear.
But many students struggle not with difficulty, but with annoying rules, many test cases, and losing rhythm under pressure.
During recent sessions, here’s how we assist in the Coding part through real-time voice guidance:
- Whether the rules are being handled in the correct order
- Whether any edge case is missing
- Which variables can be pre-computed or cached
- Which logic blocks should be separated for readability
We never touch the keyboard or screen — it’s pure directional guidance to keep you on track and stable.
This assessment is basically a small engineering task.
Having someone help you maintain direction makes the entire session much smoother.
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