Amadeus Labs, Bangalore came to hire at our college for the internship role of Software Intern.
There were three phases in the whole process:
- Coding Test
- Data Analysis Test
- Interview
Coding Test: There were three coding questions in the test. The questions were standard and medium-level questions, however, there was one special thing. Many students did copy the code from online forums, the test had a plagiarism check and therefore those people who copy pasted the code were not selected. This thing made me feel good about the company as many other companies do not even take plagiarism into account. Anyways, I went forward in this round and received the link for the next test
Data analysis test: This test was somewhat different from general aptitude-based ones! The company in its PPT said that in the second round you must carry your calculator along with you, there will be no camera or audio detection but the time allocated for each question will be very less, and seriously it was very less! Around 1 minute for each question!
Moreover, there were two sections included in this particular test which were needed to be completed one after the other:
- One included graph and table-related questions. Asking various things like if we give the table for the coal output of UK, what is the total energy extracted from all the coal-driven power plants? Questions like these were asked.
- English and Table related questions, There were only 3 questions related to English, as far as I can recollect, the rest were questions similar to the ones in section-I
However, one thing that made me admire the test was, they initially asked us to PRACTICE about the test on the platform itself, which I did multiple times! It was this that helped me in getting the question right in time! I passed this test as well 🙂
Interview: The company scheduled our interviews, the day after the second test was concluded! The interviews were to start at 10:00 am and I was the first one to get interviewed! Moreover, the interview was online and based on Hacker Rank.
Firstly, the night before my interview I looked up on the net about the Hacker Rank interview environment, I was even able to get a free demo to see the GUI of the Environment over there. Thus, prepare yourself beforehand so that no surprises follow you in the battle! 🙂
The very next day, around 9:55 am I logged into the interview link, it said to wait till the scheduled time is reached but my bad luck, at around 10:00 am only, there was an electricity outage in my area! I immediately switched to my mobile hotspot and logged in with the link! The interviewers were saying that I was going to reach out to you. I said sorry and clarified that there was a sudden electricity outage so I joined using my mobile net, is there any lag in my audio or video?? So, this is the way one has to handle things, there will be many hurdles but you have to be resilient!
Coming onto the questions, after a general introduction, the Technical Interviewer asked me :
- Explain any of your projects in detail.
I explained to him. It was an ML project actually, so he further asked about where ML is getting used. What type of problems are we able to solve using ML?? Any real-world applications of ML around you?? - Implement a Binary Tree and make In-order Traversal on it
Now, this might look simple at first, but one has to remember that you have to write a running code on the Hacker Rank Platform!! I wrote the entire code in a class format. Then made an object and called In order traversal on it! But initially, when I ran the code, there came a compilation error!
Now, the thing to notice would be I DID NOT READ THE ENTIRE CODE TO CHECK THE MISTAKE, rather I read the error stating that “inorderTraversal was not defined in this scope“. Thus, I said that there must be some scope resolution error, and Bingo, there was a scope resolution error. Okay, thinks like it’s over, well it’s not! After the compilation error, came the RUNTIME ERROR!
Without even reading the error, I said that in terms of Binary Trees this error must either be a Segmentation fault or a Memory limit exceeded due to infinite recursion calls, so I said “Let’s DO A DRY RUN BY TAKING AN EXAMPLE!” When I did a dry run I saw that in the insert operation I didn’t handle the case of inserting the very first element! Hence giving me an INVALID MEMORY REFERENCE ERROR or Segmentation fault in short!
I corrected it and then I ran the code, it executed perfectly well!!
But he asked me to explain why this 3 is before 6. let’s try again, I said let’s draw the binary tree, which I did like this on the code editor itself :
1
/ \
2 3
/ \ \
4 5 6He was satisfied with my explanation and my code! One thing to note is to practice your DSA implementation skills because many other friends of mine were asked to implement sorting algorithms. I guess I was asked to implement tree because I stated in my intro that I am a 4-star coder at Codechef 🙂 Hence maybe he decided to check whether I had achieved the rating on my own or not!
- Two Jars Puzzle
Then came the HR person, even though he came late by two or three minutes because he was having an internet connection issue. The same thing which I was going through in the beginning! Did he ask basic questions about why Amadeus? What do you know about Amadeus? and then he asked me about a simple puzzle:
Given two jars of capacity 4 L and 7 L, find the method to fill 6 L water in the 7 L jar without having any measurement scale and an infinite supply of water.
Well, I don’t know why but asked him if should we throw away the water from the jars. He said you may, I asked him if isn’t this against the environment!! 🙂 Seriously to date I don’t know why I did such mockery!! But then he said you may assume that we are providing the thrown-away water to some plantation facility! But now you will see why that mockery was fatal, somewhat actually! I asked him for time to do some rough work on this problem! He said sure, you have 30 seconds!! I realized at that moment, I should not have said that Water Pollution thing 🙁
But okay, the problem was simple, I gave the solution and then he said you did that fine! He asked me any questions.
I asked him about his experience in the company, and f he is willing to tell me! It took 5 minutes, a long time I can say to answer that and he was answering that passionately!! Then, he realized that okay time is ticking 🙂 so let’s leave it over here!
Then finally after two days long of waiting, around 10 candidates were selected and my name was at the TOP! I thought that maybe this top spot is because I consider the environment 🙂 Anyways All the very best to you buddy for your upcoming interview, have a great interview!