Accolite Digital Interview Experience (SheCodes) | On-Campus

• Accolite Digital started their drive at our college through SheCodes hiring on August 2021.
• Role: Software Engineer
• Drive: SheCodes
• Offer-type: Internship+FTE

Round 1: Online MCQ Test

• This was an MCQ round. It consisted of DSA, logical and numerical reasoning, quantitative aptitude, Networking, OS questions. This round mainly assessed our domain knowledge. There were 30 questions and 30 minutes were given to complete. The test was conducted on the Eduthrill platform, which is one of the products of Accolite Digital. The questions in this round were of easy to moderate difficulty.

Round 2: Online Coding Test

• Those who performed well in Round 1 were shortlisted for Round 2. This was a coding round. There was one coding question allotted with one hour of time.  
• question: Give the minimum number of steps to convert an array of zeros to a given target array.
• This question was given in a different way with a scenario and we had to provide the best solution in one hour’s time. The test was conducted on their platform catalyzer.

Round 3: Technical Interview 1

• Shortlists from round 2 were taken to interview rounds. Only 3 girls from the college were selected for interviews.
• The interviewer initially introduced himself and then asked my introduction. Then he asked me 3 coding questions and few questions on DSA concepts. For coding, I used GeeksforGeeks online editor.
• Remove contiguous characters from a given string such that there are no duplicates. For eg: AAAABABBABB should be converted to ABABAB. I gave both O(n2) and O(n) solutions. Coded for O(n) as it is the optimized one. The interviewer was satisfied with the solution.
• Later, he asked me to explain the approach for detecting cycles in a graph. I explained to him DFS but was not so sure of the correct approach and hence he asked me two more questions on a union-find algorithm and disjoint-set data structure as in dropping hint for me to answer the question. I explained a different approach, he wasn’t completely satisfied with it but then he mentioned that the answer was somewhat close.
• He asked me to explain the tree traversals and code for preorder traversal. I explained it clearly and coded the same with a recursive approach. He was satisfied with the solution.
• The next question was to find the minimum number of swaps to convert a given string to its given anagram. I coded for this question and we had a discussion on optimizing one of the functions.
• The interviewer also asked me the reason for choosing C++ as my preferred coding language, he agreed with my justification and was also satisfied with my skills in Java as I had both my projects in Java.
• The interviewer in the end asked for feedback and also asked if I had any questions for him. I gave the feedback and asked him to share his experience.

The interview lasted for about 1 hour 15 mins.

Round 2: Technical Interview 2

• Only I was shortlisted from the previous round and in this round interviewer asked me in detail about my projects and asked me to explain my recent project and also asked few questions on the same. So prepare well with your projects and be ready with different possible questions as in why the idea was adopted? what is the use-case? why the language used?, which sector or domain in general, it’s useful for? and so on. We also had a discussion on how the application developed in the project aims on providing a good user experience.
• After a discussion on project, she asked me a coding question. She shared a google docs sheet and I had to code my solution there. The question was to find out if a string element of an array combined with another string element is palindrome or not, i.e for a given list of unique words, return all the pairs of the distinct indices(i,j) in the given list so that the concatenation of the two words [i] + words[j] is a palindrome.

For eg:
Input: words=["abcd","dcba","lls","sssll"]
Output: [[0,1],[1,0],[2,3]]

• At first, she clearly explained the question and then asked me to give my approach. I gave an O(n2) solution and tried optimizing it but she was satisfied with the working solution itself and asked me to code it. I coded the same and she was dropping the hints whenever I would do a mistake or miss something. Later I explained the code and she asked me to optimize a function in the code and she dropped a hint for the same. I optimized the function accordingly. She was satisfied with my explanation and optimization and then she asked me to rate myself in SQL and Databases and asked me to write a SQL query that involved the use of Equi-join, arithmetic operation on columns, and aggregate function-sum().
• The query was to find the total order amount for the given customer, Order Id would be given as input. I wrote a query for the same and she was satisfied with it.
• The interviewer tipped me to keep learning Java as its most widely used for projects and also agreed with my selection of C++ for basic coding.

This round lasted for about an hour.

Round 5: Hr

HR asked me the most commonly asked HR questions like

• Introduce yourself.
• Why Accolite Digital?
• Where do I see myself in 5 years?
• How much have I familiarized myself with technology in the past year?
• What is my preferred work location? and so on.

later he gave me a brief about Accolite Digital and gave me the salary break up. Also, asked if I had any questions for him, I asked about the Internship and then asked him if he has any suggestions for me? He suggested I keep updating with technology.

Verdict:Selected.

Overall Experience :

• The recruitment process was quite smooth and also the interviewers were very kind and helpful. They taught me something new, to handle my code when I was nervous, and debug accordingly. This was my first interview and was a very good experience.

Tips:  Practice DSA, DBMS, OS, CNS concepts very well as these are the most commonly asked questions in an interview for CS / IS domain.