Interview Experience 61

1st Round:

4 sections: Communication Skills, Software Engineering Aptitude, General Computer Science, Coding Questions

NOTE: Speed is the key in this round, no negative marking was there so try to attempt all.

*40 odd people were selected for PI's.

1st PI:

What is Floyd's triangle, write code for it?

Sorting algorithms, only say what you know 100%. Insertion, Merge sort was asked.

Array of elements are given, replace each cell with the product of the rest of the numbers using O(1) space.

Stock Span Problem: Since I never heard of the problem, she was kind enough to explain the problem, and then I solved it.

OOPS, Snippet containing Inheritance + Constructors, had to predict output. *Make sure you know the fundamentals of OOPS "properly". *

Best feature about Java till date, its tricky.. whatever you say.. you will be grilled in that topic, choose carefully.

No puzzles were asked in this round.

2nd PI:

*Given an array of elements with only one unique element and other elements repeated multiple times, return the unique element. ( Not as easy as it sounds)

Interviewer forced me to give a recursive solution first, then an iterative, then multiple variations of this question was asked.

*Some tough queries regarding Inner Join, delete duplicate elements in a table.

*Given any string, find out whether a palindrome can be formed out of the given elements( again sounds easy, but lots of corner cases need to be covered)

*The famous water-jug puzzle.

*Pointers in C. Far, huge, near pointer's.

*What is serialization in JAVA? Implement your version of it.

*Finally concluded with the house-robber question, which is a standard DP question.

NOTE: Be confident of your solutions, take your time but arrive at the MOST efficient solution. Always engage the interviewer, keep talking about what are the possible approaches, ideas etc.

3rd PI:

Lots of questions in Internship Projects, be thorough with it.

Drifted to hobbies, passion, interests.

Then told me to design a data structure and the corresponding algorithm which takes an employee-manager relation table as input and prints the entire hierarchy of the organization as output.

(Trick: Imagine the output to be like a B tree. Hint: restructure the hashmap to take <string,arraylist>)

Normalization in depth was asked, MUST read this topic.

Basic questions regarding location preferences.

HR Round:

Suppose you are the director of NIT-DGP, elaborate 3 changes you like to make.

Basic questions etc. Try to engage with the HR as much as possible.

Do you have any questions? ... Ask strategic questions to know more about the growth prospects of the role.