Accolite Digital Interview Experience for SDE Internship+FTE (Off-Campus) 2022

Round 1 (Coding round): I don’t exactly remember the question but it was the intermediate-level question (P. S:  Lookout for their coding environment it’s hard to understand ).

Round 2 (MCQ CS Fundamentals): 30 min MCQ round: 30 questions based on CS fundamentals (not hard and some questions are way too easy).

Round 3 (Technical interview round 1): (1:15 hrs.): First, the interviewer gave his introduction and asked me to introduce myself. After the introduction, he shared a google docs link with me and asked me to screen share.

He gave a DSA question on Tree similar to this question Sum of Root To Leaf Binary Numbers, he asked me to first explain and then write the pseudocode, I explained to him two different approaches and was able to tell the optimal solution. this all took about 10-15 min to explain and write code.

 Then he asked 2nd question on DSA which was Sort array after converting elements to their squares. First, I gave him a vagueness and then told optimal solution, for this question too he asked me to write pseudocode and explain. After coding, he asked me questions on OOPs concept in topics: Abstraction, encapsulation, the difference between abstract class and interface. In my resume I have added guitarist as a hobby, seems like he also plays guitar so he asked me whether I can play open cords and freestyling and all.

Round 4 (Technical interview round 2): (1 hour): Here the interviewer was an experienced person(4+ yrs) he started the interview by asking for an introduction. After that, he asked me how much will I rate myself in DSA. I have been thinking of it as an off-campus fun I said him 10/10 ( Seeing me overconfident he later gave me a DP question 🙁  ) anyway he started by asking about my previous interview what questions were asked to me in my 1st technical round. Then he shared the LeetCode compiler link with me.

 He gave me a question on string manipulation which was to check whether two strings are an anagram of each other. I gave him a variety of solutions including a 26 size array, hash map, etc. then he asks me to write a runnable code in the compiler. I code in python and unfortunately “ord” function which is used to get the ASCII value of char was unable in the leetcode compiler so the code was not able but he pretty much got the answer to his question.

Second, he throw me a DP question which was Longest Palindromic Substring. This question can be done in many ways so instead of going with the DP approach I told him using 2 points compare to DP it was more efficient as it requires O(1) space and the DP solution requires O(n^2) of space. he asked me to write the runnable code again, it is a Difficulty Level Hard question so took me 8-10 attempts to finally get the answer(PS: because writing runnable requires checking corner condition and also out of index one of the most annoying errors). so I was able to solve the question with the best complexity possible after that he said we can do it in another way too completing his sentence I said yes we can do it in DP  but this approach is more option but I also explained to him the DP approach not asked to write DP solution. After the coding part, he asked me how much I will rate myself in the OOP concept. to be on the safer side I said I don’t have much knowledge in java but pretty decent in OOP. I was expecting that he’ll ask me the four pillars of OOP and that stuff but instead, he asked whether I play chess, and asked to make a HIGH-LEVEL SYSTEM DESIGN FOR CHESS. this part was more like a discussion like more of the implementation part in the real world if we want to make a chess application.

interview concluded!

Round 5 (HR round): (30 min): Some usual hr questions like:

• Introduce yourself.
• preferred location.
• where do you see yourself in 5 years?
• any other offers I have?

HR told me about the company and what are the services they are providing briefly.

Verdict: SELECTED

Tips: Keep your DSA concept crystal clear as accolite is famous for asking Link List and Tree questions majorly. Say only if you can prove, when he asked me what I’ll rate myself in DSA I said 10/10, and I was able to solve both questions optimally, it was not able to solve them I would be looking like the fool in front of the interviewer. But also on other hand, it gave me an advantage for confidence. Along with DSA revise other subjects basics too including DBMS, OS, CN, and OOP. At last, be polite.

ALL THE BEST!!