Accolite Interview Experience | Set 18 (On-Campus)
Rounds:
1. Aptitude Round
2. Technical Round M1
3. Technical Round M2
4. Technical Round M3
5. HR Round
- Aptitude Round: There were 20 MCQs and the time limit was 30 mins. Marking was +1 for correct answers and -2.5 for incorrect attempts. The questions contained 2-3 questions from Quants/Logical Reasoning. 2 from O.S., 2 from Networking, rest from programming (mainly D.S.) out of 600 students only 23 cleared this round.
- The first technical interview. Before the interview all 23 students were called in a conference room and showed a presentation about the company and the post and package they were offering. Coming o the interview. My interview was the longest in duration. Nearly 1 hr and 40 mins. Questions:
- You are given an array with negative and positive unsorted numbers. Find out a pair whose sum = 0. If no such pair exists, find the pair whose sum is the closest to 0. I solved the problem first normally(complexity of n^2) and then more efficiently(complexity n log n). But he was looking for a solution having linear complexity. (It is not possible to solve it in linear complexity)
- He then modified the problem and made it to find the pair of elements with largest possible positive product. This was easy and I did it in O(n) complexity . First he doubted my approach and dry runned the whole program. But it worked perfectly.
- Next question: You are given an array of strings, you need to find out the longest chain such that the last character of the k-th element of the chain and the first character of the k+1th element are the same. Similarly, he last character of the last element should be equal to the first character of the first element. He told me to just explain my approach and not write the whole code as the question was difficult. I could not answer the question efficiently. I used a recursive method to solve the problem but that meant that the worst case complexity was in exponential n form.
- Next question: Given an array of positive integers, how would you break it into two arrays such that the sum of elements in both the arrays is same. I had initially solved the problem by first sorting the array and then adding elements in it from the greatest element first order, adding only the elements possible to add. On this, he cross questioned me and being in this interview for more than 1 hr 30 mins almost, my brain was no more functional and I changed some parts of the program which ruined the purpose. Moreover he wanted me to solve it without sorting the array. I had almost given up when he himself asked me go out and wait for results.
He had first kept my CV, which made me think that I might have made it as they were returning back the CVs of the students who were not selected. But later he called someone and asked him to return me my CV. From 23, only 4 were selected for the further rounds and unfortunately I didn’t make it. (Even if only 1 person is selected in any round, he has to go through the remaining rounds. That is, the company might even reject that 1 candidate and return empty handed) But the interview was a good experience and there are very few companies having such an interview. I thoroughly had a good experience despite not being selected. Moreover, am still searching for answer for the 3rd question and also if anyone could solve the last question in linear complexity approach, please comment.
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