Accolite Interview Experience (Pool Drive)

Accolite conducted a pool drive in Mumbai on July 2019 where few engineering colleges from Mumbai were allowed to participate. 

Round 1(Online Aptitude Round): This round was conducted on eduthrill. 

• The test consisted of 30 questions and each question had 1 min timer. Marks were awarded based on the quicker you answer the question i.e answering the question faster fetched more points. There were no negative marks. 
• The questions were mostly based on what will be the output of the code snippet, 2-3 questions based on OS, DBMS, etc. 
• Based on the points candidates were shortlisted for the next online coding round. All scoring greater than about 180 were shortlisted. 
  

Tip: Eduthrill themselves provide practice test sessions, make sure you practice thoroughly on the platform. 

Note: Make sure you have the basic knowledge of all 3 C/C++/JAVA because the test is not specific to any language 

Round 2(Online Coding Round): The test consisted of one coding question and we were given 1 hr to solve it. The question was based on Strings 

Given a String which can only contain D, H, B, C you need to find the size of the smallest substring that has to replaced in order to make it stable. A stable string is the one which has each character occurring n/4 times eg. 

1. DHBC is a stable String since all the characters D, H, B and C occur 1 time which is 4/4=1.
2. DDDHBBCD: Here the ans is 2 as replacing substring DD at indexes 0,1 with HC makes the string stable.

Try to solve the question with as many hidden test cases and as soon as possible because that provides extra benefit during the interview process. I could solve 3/5 hidden test cases. After this process about 28 were shortlisted for the interview round from our college and were called to St. Francis College. 4 colleges in total participated in the pool and there were around 130-140 students. 

Round 3(Written Test: Pen-paper): Those with 4 or more hidden test-cases solved in Online coding round were asked to skip this round and directly sit for the personal interviews (there were around 20 such students). I, however, had to give the written test along with 100 such candidates. This test consisted of 2 questions and the duration was 1hr. The languages preferred were C/C++/JAVA but in case a person doesn’t know any of them python was allowed. 

The questions were: 

1. Next Biggest Number using same digits
2. Zig-Zag Order Traversal

I wrote the complete code for Zig-Zag and a code that passed a few test_cases for the first. After this round 10-15 candidates were shortlisted for the personal interviews. 

Note: Many of the candidates knew the logic but didn’t succeed in writing code such candidates were not shortlisted. So actually around 30-35 candidates gave the interviews 

Round 4(Technical Interview -1): The interviewer started with a keen look at my resume and asked me “Tell me about yourself”.

The questions then asked were pure algo Ds Few of them were: 

1. Next Greater Element
2. Trapping Rainwater Problem
3. Width of a skewed Binary tree

In all the problems I always started with a brute-force approach and then the interviewer himself guided me through various optimizations. 

• The key was to keep on popping any idea/any approach that you could think of before the interviewer. Always consider an interview as two-way communication and not one-way. 
• After algo Ds he then moved to my projects, I had a project on web-sockets so he asked to design a solution to a real-life problem using web-sockets. The scenario was You have a server which has multiple clients connected to it, there’s a hashmap and there are multiple CRUD operations being performed simultaneously, your job is to update to hashmaps on clients screen using web-sockets (real-time fetching) 
• Later he asked to design LRU cache of my own. He was more interested in knowing the various data structures that I would use to design that.
  

Round 5(Technical Interview -2): Here also the interviewer started with my resume, he asked me a few questions on my projects and internships and then moved on to algo DS. 

The questions asked here were 

1. Sum of Subset
2. Floyd Warshall

Note: Make sure you are able to write the code for the same as only knowing the logic will not do. He asked me to write code and then asked me to explain. Also, you should be able to derive the complexity of your code. Make sure you know about time and space complexities. 

After then he started asking me OOP concepts such as encapsulation, Abstraction. abstract class vs interface, etc. Then more of java questions like 

1. What is the static keyword? the static method, static variables, etc
2. More on String pool. Difference between String s=”abc”; and String s = new String(“abc”);

Round 6(Technical Interview 3 – Puzzle Round): The interviewer first asked me to design a random number generator of my own to which I first came up with writing a big mathematical function and passing any number as input. He was not satisfied and said that it was not random and asked to use something different. Later I came up with using timestamp i.e getting the timestamp at which the function was called and then return the value obtained by summing the digits present in timestamp up. 

After the approach he then asked me design the function such it randomly returns 1, 2 or 3 but the probability of returning 2 is 50%, 1 is 25% and 3 is 25%. I tried solving it through various approaches and was constantly interacting with the interview about the same. He then wanted optimization such that given any range of numbers and their probabilities the function should work accordingly. 

Later there were two puzzles 

1. There’s a watchman and there are two boxes. One box has gold while the other is empty. You ask watchman only one question “Where is the gold?” to which the watchman replies with one box. The watchman might be telling the truth or lie. We need to get the gold always.
2. Coin puzzle

I couldn’t solve any of the two. However was told to wait. There were 18 candidates after the puzzle round out of which 8 were asked to leave. 

Now there were 10 candidates and they took around 1-2 hrs to decide who was going to be shortlisted. 

Round 7(HR Round): Out of the 10, 7 were called for the HR round. The round consisted of questions like 

1. Tell me about yourself
2. Strengths/weaknesses
3. Locations preferences, etc.

Out of those 7, 6 were hired and I was one of them. Lastly, I would like to say that have enough practice of problems. Practice questions on interviewbit, GeeksforGeeks, etc and then you should be good to go.