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LeetCode 857 · Solution & editorial
There are n workers. You are given two integer arrays quality and wage where quality[i] is the quality of the ith worker and wage[i] is the minimum wage expectation for the ith worker.
Minimum Cost to Hire K Workers is a Heap (Priority Queue) Patterns problem, in the Scheduling / Minimum Cost (Greedy with Priority Queue) subpattern. The pattern covers top K elements, K-way merge, two heaps for median, and scheduling
Solve scheduling and optimization problems using priority queue with greedy approach.
The reference solution runs in O(n log n) time and O(n) space.
Minimum Cost to Hire K Workers has been reported in interviews at Google.
The full editorial is part of Pro
It explains the core insight, the complexity analysis and the common mistakes, with a worked solution.
Minimum Cost to Hire K Workers is a Heap (Priority Queue) Patterns problem, in the Scheduling / Minimum Cost (Greedy with Priority Queue) subpattern. Once the approach above makes sense, write it yourself and then work through the neighbouring problems that reuse it.