Accolite Digital Interview Experience for Intern+FTE (On-Campus)

Difficulty: Medium

Accolite visited our campus to hire for an intern+full time engineer role in August 2022. It was a virtual placement drive.

Around 300 students were shortlisted for the test by them. They allowed students from CS, IT and EnTC for the drive.

Round 1: This was an online test conducted on the EduThrill platform. It consisted 0f 30 easy levels MCQs from DSA, Computer Architecture, DBMS, aptitude, and 1 coding question.

Coding question:

It was a medium-level question.

• https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/count-minimum-steps-get-given-desired-array/

The question consisted of 10 test cases and I cleared all of them.

Round 2: 14 students were shortlisted for this round which was the first technical round. The interviewer asked me to introduce myself and speak about one of the projects I had worked on.

Then she started asking questions on core subjects.

Questions:

OOPS:

• What are classes and objects?
• How is OOPS better than procedure-oriented programming?
• What are friend functions and classes?
• What are pure virtual functions in c++.

JAVA:

• What is an abstract keyword?
• What is a final keyword?
• Difference between compile-time and run-time polymorphism.
• Implement constructor overloading. Was supposed to write code with an example.
• How many catch blocks can we include while exception handling?
• When does the final block run?
• Why is the main method static in JAVA?
• In inheritance, if you create a child class object then which constructor will be called, the parent’s or child’s constructor?

Python:

• The difference between lists and tuples.
• What are different scopes in python?

DBMS:

• What is DDL?
• What is normalization?
• Difference between primary key and unique key.
• Name a few NoSQL databases.

DSA:

• Write a program to count the number of leave nodes of a binary tree.
  https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/write-a-c-program-to-get-count-of-leaf-nodes-in-a-binary-tree/
• Write a program to print a zig-zag traversal of a binary tree.
  https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/zigzag-tree-traversal/

I had to write proper code for the above problems.

• Right view of a binary tree(Only approach).
  https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/print-right-view-binary-tree-2/
• Write code to find the middle of a Linked list.
  https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/write-a-c-function-to-print-the-middle-of-the-linked-list/

I was not allowed to write code on any online compiler, was supposed to write all the code on notepad.

The interview ended with a few riddles…

• How many traffic signals are there in India?
• When does a potato change its nationality?
• A lady was born in 1975 and today she is 30 years old. How is this statement valid?
• How many liters to paint the Taj Mahal?

This round went on for 1.5 hours.

Round 3: This was the second technical round.

• Introduce yourself.
• Tell me about a project you have worked on.

 Core subjects:

• Explain copy constructor.
• Shallow copy and deep copy.
• What is encapsulation?
• Explain security and Integrity in DBMS.
• Difference between DROP, TRUNCATE, and DELETE.
• Which operation is faster in computation:  i++ OR i=i+1.
• Mergesort vs Quicksort: which performs better in worst-case.

The interviewer gave me a coding problem to solve and implement.

• Given an array return the product of any 5 numbers such that the product is maximum.
  Ex: 
  Input: 3,1,10,4,10,5,10
  Output:20000
  Logic:10*10*10*5*4
• https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/find-maximum-product-of-a-triplet-in-array/

I was given the above question but instead of triplet, I was supposed to do it with 5 numbers.

This round went on for 45 minutes.

Round 4: This was the last technical round.

• Introduce yourself.
• Explain a project.

The interviewer wanted to know about my understanding of Databases and SQL.

• Imagine you are designing a library management system. Design a schema for the system.

We started discussing which tables should be created and the attributes they must consist of. I designed 4 tables then the interviewer asked me to remove redundant attributes and cross-questioned me regarding the primary and foreign keys of all tables.

Finally asked me to write a query to retrieve the books allocated to a student named=”ABC”.

Struggled for 7-8 minutes because 2 tables were involved to complete the query but wrote the query using joins and nested query.

It was more of a discussion with a lot of input from the interviewer which went on for half an hour.

Round 5: This was the final HR round with typical HR questions

• Tell me about yourself
• A project you have worked on
• Why do you want to join accolite.
• Strengths and weaknesses
• Have you ever worked in a pressure situation?
• How did you utilize your time in lockdown?

Finally, she explained to me about company policies, culture, and salary components.

Accolite hired 3 students out of the 14 and I was one of them.

 Tips:

• Study binary trees, linked list, searching-sorting, OOPS, DBMS and SQL thoroughly for Accolite, their interview revolves around these topics.
• Study your projects enough to be able to have at least 10 minutes of discussion with the interviewer.
• Every round is an elimination round so try to give your best in each round.